(no paper is attached to this workshop)

Recent literature on Ontario’s income support policies centres on the identification and deconstruction of neoliberal principles that have become embedded in these policies in the last thirty years. This body of scholarship explores the implications of the changes to income support policies in relation to needs such as housing, food security, education, treatment and childcare. It highlights the coercive mechanisms entrenched in these policies that compel claimants to constitute themselves as deserving subjects. What is absent from this literature, however, is an exploration of the specific implications of this neoliberal shift for psychiatric survivors/consumers accessing the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). The experiences of psychiatric survivors/consumers accessing ODSP are compounded by the laws governing psychiatric institutionalization, as well as the criminalization of psychiatric survivors/consumers. These challenges are often neglected in traditional income support scholarship. It is, therefore, necessary to pay special attention to this community when discussing income support, and specifically ODSP. Drawing on insights from critical political economy, political geography, critical disability studies and public policy analysis, this paper went beyond simply identifying the neoliberal principles embedded in ODSP. This paper examined how ODSP policy, mental health law and the criminal justice system intersect in a way that places the housing of psychiatric survivors/consumers in jeopardy. I argued that this intersection of policy and law has the effect of disciplining psychiatric survivors/consumers to constitute themselves in accordance with neoliberal principles, specifically individualism and privatization. This paper went on to explore the current proposals for reform in an effort to demonstrate the paucity of transformative suggestions regarding the coercive mechanisms specifically impacting psychiatric survivors/consumers. This paper concluded with recommended changes to ODSP policy as well as housing, food security and childcare policies in an effort to remove this coercive mechanism from the lives of psychiatric survivor/consumers accessing ODSP.