"Two terms that have been proposed to label the discrimination against people with mental illness are sanism and mentalism, which have appeared in legal and social science research circles but haven’t caught on with the public or with mass media. Sanism was coined by attorney Morton Birnbaum in the 1960s, when he was representing Edward Stephens, a patient with mental illness who claimed he was receiving inadequate treatment. Law professor and mental health advocate Michael L. Perlin has perpetuated the term in legal literature, writing extensively about it since the 1980s. American activist and educator in the psychiatric survivor movement Judi Chamberlin coined the term mentalism in her book On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System, published in 1978. Neither sanism nor this definition of mentalism appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)."
Sanist Microaggressions are commonplace verbal or behavioral indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults in relation to neurodivergence and/or mental health diagnoses. They are structurally based and invoke oppressive systems of a "normal cognition" hierarchy. Sanist Microinvalidations, Microinsults, Microassaults are specific types of microaggressions.
Note: The prefix “micro” is used because these are invocations of normalized cognition hierarchy at the individual level (person to person), where as the "macro" level refers to aggressions committed by structures as a whole (e.g. an organizational policy). "Micro" in no way minimalizes or otherwise evaluates the impact or seriousness of the aggressions.
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Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice lens. We help support the emotional wellness of all people, and center the needs of those most marginalized by our society. Our work seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression, often reproduced by the mental health system.
We strive to cultivate a culture of care, free of violence, where the ultimate goal is not just to survive, but to thrive as individuals and as communities. We envision a world in which all communities get to self-determine the source of their care, medicine, and wellness.
Healing Justice (HJ) is a framework rooted in racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice. Healing Justice provides us with tools we can use to interrupt the systems of oppression that impact our mental health. Fireweed Collective uses HJ as a guide to help redefine what medicine is, and increase who has access to it.
We are honored to be a part of a larger community of organizations guided by the principles of Healing Justice:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This Libguide began with the main categories and many of the resources from of the amazing Simmons University Libguide (referenced above), and has grown to include sources from our ASM colleagues, as well as colleges, universities, associations and NGOs from across the globe. It is a work in progress with news, resources and links to actionable information.