Bay-area folks with an interest in critical psychiatry/critical medicine may be interested in the following Berkeley/UCSF-based project "Visions of Radical Medicine."  Many of the researchers, students and community members currently involved focus on mental health and related service systems.

‘Visions of Radical Medicine’

This cooperative working group is a forum for contributing to new forms of medical practice.  We ask: how can we address injustices and inequalities in clinical medicine by drawing on personal experience, clinical practice, and lessons learned from the social sciences?  Bringing together community members, patients, physicians, and scholars from multiple disciplines, this collaborative prioritizes the knowledge and contribution of all its members. We seek to educate ourselves through the expertise of patients and community members, and, in doing so, envision developing new models of clinical medicine that serve real people.  Bringing together different voices, experiences, and knowledge, our ultimate goal is to pioneer new approaches to long-standing problems of inequality and injustice in clinical medicine.

To achieve this goal, we will push beyond existing frameworks of healthcare interventions that focus narrowly on individual behaviors and treat patients as simply individuals.  Instead we will pursue radical goals for medicine, targeting issues such as racism, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, gender violence, and other forms of injustice and inequality.  We are united by a common goal of creating a social medicine – a healing of the illnesses of not only individual patients but also society itself.  Our approach to this goal, and the central objective of this working group, is to collaboratively design interventions in which social analysis and critique may improve clinical practice. 

 

Our investigations in this working group proceed practically as follows:

·      Identify areas of clinical medicine with unresolved inequalities and injustices that require novel interventional approaches

·      Assess existing forms of interventions aimed to reduce inequality in clinical medical practice. 

·      Evaluate the results of past interventions. 

·      Consult the social sciences for possible reconfigurations of the forms of intervention. 

·      Design experimental interventions at the level of clinic spaces and doctor-patient relationships through collaborative engagement.

·      Publish the envisioned experimental designs publicly and freely as an ‘Operations Manual for Radical Medicine.’ Other initial forms of public engagement will include a newsletter and a website. 

·      Explore the possibility of putting these interventions into practice in collaboration with local practitioners and community members.

For more information and to get involved, contact:

Michael D’Arcy (darcy@berkeley.edu)

Anthony Wright (agwright12@gmail.com)

Australia is now home to some of the best organized hearing voices network groups and collectives in the world.  Prahran Mission's Voices Vic is one such group.  Be sure and check out some of their exciting projects including:

• Research collaborations with Monash University's Voices Clinic, including a randomized control trial (RCT) of a 1-to-1 peer intervention incorporating HVN principles and Intentional Peer Support (IPS).
• An amazing training line-up, including workshops on facilitation, voice profiling, voice dialogue, dissociation, and trainings targeting family & friends.
• Voices Unplugged: a video project featuring "the real stories of voices hearers."