Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare, A Series of Workshops

You’re invited to join a two-hour weekly writers’ workshop resulting from a collaboration between Madwomen in the Attic, Herstory Writers Workshop, and the Coalition for Community Writing. This workshop, facilitated by Jessica Lowell Mason and Janelle Gagnon, will bring together storytellers who want to write a changed, reformed, or new mental healthcare model into existence by tuning into their experience and wisdom in order to explore, share, and shape stories and deep truths that speak back to power structures and compel a care system to care.

During the workshop, we will nurture connections and bring together our experiences to craft with poetic attunement the stories of our souls that we hope will transform and reform mental healthcare. Together, we will gather to shape our stories in our mutual intention to transform care by compelling those who meet at the interface of mental healthcare systems to listen, care, and learn from our stories.

Storytellers affected by the mental healthcare system who have in them an untold story about their experiences in the system and want to delve into their power through the act of telling their story in the service of a revolutionary goal are invited to join a mad-affirming, human rights agenda-driven, supportive environment for crafting memoirs that will change hearts and minds, as well as combat stigma and discrimination through the power of storytelling. Whether you have a vision for a different system, a writhing anger at injustice within it, or a need to amplify your truth, we invite you to join us to use the power of your voice to (re)shape our mental healthcare system and (re)imagine care.

The workshop meetings will be held on Thursday afternoons, from 4:30 – 6:30 PM EST on Zoom. Registration is free. Registrants are encouraged to send a letter of interest to the facilitators at jlmason1@buffalo.edu and janelle.gagnon@stonybrook.edu to inquire and enroll. In this letter, include pertinent biographical information and tell us about your interest in the workshop.

Short Description of the Workshop from the Herstory Writers’ Network website:

This workshop invites people who have been affected by the mental healthcare system, who may identify as mad, psychiatric survivors, psychiatric consumers, or neurodivergent, to write their memoir in a mad-affirming, human rights-driven, supportive environment. In this workshop, we will combat stigma and discrimination through the power of storytelling to change hearts, minds, and policies. We invite you to join us to use the power of your voice to (re)shape our mental healthcare system and (re)imagine care.