From Pathology to Power

Anticolonial understandings of mental health, safety and suicide

Join us for an in-person teach-in about how racism, colonization, and eurocentrism shape and dictate our feelings, ethics, and approaches to mental health struggles, treatment, and well-being. We'll be exploring important lessons and stories from the Global South, challenging perspectives,and sparking meaningful conversations.

This session is best suited for those who offer frontline support and care, or are supporting staff in organizations that offer frontline services, including counsellors, nurses, social workers, HR leaders, teachers, and PCP's.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Develop skills to recognize internalized eurocentrism
• Un-learn colonial and patriarchal views on mental health, suicide, and safety
• Learn embodied ways of collaborating with clients and incorporating deep consent into our sessions

About the Presenter

Nazanin Moghadami (all pronouns) is a Kurdish-Iranian clinical counsellor, community organizer and activist living on the lands of Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) speaking peoples, known as Burnaby.

She has more than 10 years of clinical experience providing individual and group counselling support. She has worked with various organizations such as EVA BC, Trans Care BC, Trans Specialty Care team, MOSAIC, BC CDC and more offering trainings, staff support and strategic consultation.

In her time as the program manager at Rainbow Refugee, queer and trans refugee health became an important part of her portfolio. She worked with various provincial organizations to make gender affirming care more inclusive and accessible to racialized and displaced folks, and worked with federal and national policy makers to make refugee health care more incluve and safer for queer and trans dispaced people.In accordance to the TRC's call to action, she has been educating her community on impacts of colonization and legacy of residential school on Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.

During the growth of her personal and professional expereinces Nazanin stated to realized the inadequacy, and sometimes harms, embedded in what she has learned during her masters degree and various trauma and somatic trainings and certifications she has taken. The narrow definitions of well-being and health, readiness to pathologize natural human responses and behaviours, judgements of survival desires all contribute to inaccessibility of counselling for those from the Global South.

She is currently founding a multi-disciplinary clinic, Nabat Health Center, for racialized community members by racialized providers.

Tickets

If you are part of a community groups and organization, or if the cost is a barrier, please send a message to Nazanin.