Workshop

Date: Friday, 9/25

Time: 2:30-3:45pm

This presentation examines how psychiatric coercion extends beyond locked inpatient units into the everyday pressure to “engage” with mental health systems that often fail to make meaningful space for mad, psychiatric survivor, and lived experience knowledge. Drawing on psychiatric survivor scholarship, disability justice, mental health law and policy, and preliminary qualitative work from PathLab, a University of Pittsburgh research lab grounded in critical social theory and participatory, community-engaged methods, the session explores how‚ “engagement‚” can become a compliance demand when services are conditional, surveilling, or organized around narrow clinical assumptions about insight, risk, and recovery. The presentation asks what consent means when people are pressured to participate in systems that do not recognize their ways of making meaning, naming harm, or defining support. It considers disengagement not only as clinical failure, but sometimes as critique, refusal, self-protection, or evidence that services themselves must change. Learning goals/objectives: – Identify how pressure to, “engage‚” can function as coercion when services are conditional, surveilling, or organized around compliance. – Explain how psychiatric survivor and mad knowledge challenge dominant assumptions about disengagement, insight, risk, and recovery. – Analyze how institutional logics persist in community mental health through treatment mandates, documentation, risk management, and narrow definitions of participation.