Abstract

This major research paper is a modified critical discourse analysis of lived experience testimonials from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)’s Coping with COVID-19 campaign. Social work practitioners and researchers must consider the inherent violence in the complex manifestations of sanism and racism (re)produced through discourse and their inextricable confluence with institutions, colonial legacies and realities which operate at this juncture in support of white supremacy. The identified discourses reproduce the ideal neoliberal subject and operate as technologies which maintain the colonial project and white supremacy. If we stake any claim to anti-racist praxis at this juncture, it is necessary to radically disclose our complicity within this colonial project, acknowledge our confluent realities and interrogate any claim to anti-racism. If we fail to interrogate these discourses constructing madness, we not only permit the violent trajectory of sanism but operationalize the deeply entrenched (re)production of violent white supremacy. key words: critical discourse analysis, sanism, racism, white supremacy, psychocentrism

Highlights

  • This chapter will analyze the relevance of the discourses identified from Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)’s Coping with COVID-19 campaign

  • Coping with COVID-19 can be classified as an anti-stigma awareness campaign in its apparent attempts to normalize and destigmatize “mental illness” through its construction of the good, mad subject at this juncture of COVID-19

  • The construction of the ideal mad subject or CAMH family member through these discourses is embedded within a violent trajectory of colonialism and eugenic rationale, operationalizing technologies of white supremacy and requiring intense interrogation

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Summary

Introduction

My MRP research is interested in furthering critical inquiry through discourse analysis as a means to examine and extrapolate the discursive technologies which construct madness, simultaneously supporting the colonial project and white supremacy.

Results
Conclusion
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