Talking Health: Decolonising Healthcare, With Annabel Sowemimo and the Politics Of Mental Health With Micha Frazer-carroll

Chikwe Ihekweazu, Assistant Director General at WHO: “… we are all too aware of the urgent health inequalities that plague our world. But these inequalities have always been urgent: modern medicine has a colonial and racist history.”

In her talk, Dr Annabel Sowemimo unravels the colonial roots of modern medicine. Tackling systemic racism, hidden histories and healthcare myths, Sowemimo recounts her own experiences as a doctor, patient and activist. Divided exposes the racial biases of medicine that affect our everyday lives and provides an illuminating insight into how our world works, and who it works for.  As well as being a sexual and reproductive health registrar in the NHS, she is also the founder of community-based organisation Reproductive Justice Initiative.

Mental health is a political issue, but we discuss it as a personal one. How is the current mental health crisis connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues? In a different world, how might we transform the ways that we think about mental health, diagnosis and treatment? Micha Frazer-Carroll reveals mental health to be a concern that needs deeper understanding beyond ‘awareness-raising’. She explores the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability justice, queer liberation and mental health; art and creativity; prisons and abolition; and alternative models of care; her book Mad World is a radical antidote to pathologisation, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination.