(no paper is attached to this workshop)

My presentation was about the experiences of psychiatric survivors as well as ways in which we empower ourselves and fight against the control and trauma of institutionalization and ways we nurture emotional well-being for ourselves to heal. In my expose, I used a creative approach to make a presentation in the form of storytelling that uses words, poetry, performance, photography and video in order to challenge colonial tools upon which psychiatric trauma is often based. I hoped to show that healing for women of colour who have faced psychiatric trauma has to happen outside of schools, hospitals, and agencies because these places are what have carried out a collective assault on our diverse identities. I highlighted that such places seek to standardize many of us in an ongoing system of control and power and label us crazy when we refuse to allow ourselves be colonized. I hoped to show how women of colour are continuously organizing amongst themselves in places academic and medical practitioners don’t look, in our informal social networks, and our everyday art and lives, to free our minds and bodies from the abuses by doctors who are often white men and agencies that are often controlling mechanisms of the country’s colonial regime.