Given the reductive takes on mental health being shared this week, let me just say this:

This isn't about ~stigma~

Mad folk aren't oppressed solely bc of people's personal attitudes. Our lives won't materially improve by dispelling "stigma."

Sanism is a system of oppression.

Mad folk - esp. BIPOC Mad folk- are disproportionately more likely to be poor, unemployed, unhoused, incarcerated, killed by police, & killed via medical neglect.

This shit isn't bc of stigma, it's bc sanism is an oppressive structure that undergirds racism & upholds capitalism.

We need to stop reducing this work to changing hearts & minds.
We need to apply an anti-oppression paradigm that recognizes how the state wields sanism/ableism to exert carceral control over Black & brown people (whether they're disabled or not) & to concentrate wealth & power.

The legal system uses sanism & ableism to expand its carceral & surveillance apparatus.
The history of psychiatry/the mental health system in this country is inextricably bound in the histories of slavery, immigration exclusion, confinement, & the policing of gender & sexuality.

So I'm tired of these takes focused on stigma.

Because it's going to take a lot more than narrative change/dispelling stigma to free our people.

What we need is to abolish policing & the prison industrial complex, to invest in community & healing models of communal care.