Exploring Radical Change in Mental Health Care with Tamar Ben-Barak

Many people around the world, both service users, families and professionals, have yearned for a radical change in mental healthcare.

They point out that the inadequate medical model, the damaging concept of “mental illness”, and the inheritance of aggressive practices, forced treatments and fundamental disrespect has shaped mental healthcare to this day.

Many attempts to change it have failed to alter the basic premise of mental healthcare. More often than not, these attempts lead to tokenism and superficial language change. Many improvements have been implemented as an add-on layer (i.e. “Recovery Plans”, Safewards program or the use of Sensory Modulation). This strategy rarely challenges, changes or stops harmful core practices. Instead, it creates additional workload and thus is prone to a short lifespan and limited sustainable impact.

Tamar Ben-Barak suggests that to achieve a radical change in this space, we need no less than a new field of knowledge and practice that could replace the Mental Health field from its foundation.

Tamar says that this new field has already put forward alternatives, from the Power Threat Meaning Framework and Open Dialogue to many local, survivors-led initiations.She believes that recognizing ourselves as a field in the making would support the radical change we yearn for and allow us to finally leave behind the misinformed “mental illness” concept and rid ourselves of the medicalisation of human distress.

In this workshop, the participants will be invited to envision a new way forward . We will explore the contemporary initiatives around the world, “connect the dots” to discover their common themes and shared principles, and discuss the core questions.

Biography

Tamar Ben-Barak is a developmental occupational therapist with over 20 years of experience. She worked with children for over ten years. Bringing her developmental lenses and personal knowledge of trauma into mental healthcare, she became highly skilled in this space while “rejecting almost everything the field tried to teach me”. Disheartened and disillusioned by the Mental Health field’s misinformed approach and iatrogenic traumata, she became a Mad activist.

As a therapist, Tamar is highly appreciative of “troublemaker” clients because they are excellent at keeping her on the right track.

Links to published work

The Social-Emotional Distress Field or How I Divorced “Mental Health”, Mad in America

https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/01/how-i-divorced-mental-health/

Scenario-based assessment tasks, Supporting Inclusion online training program, La Trobe Universityhttps://supportinginclusion.weebly.com/assessment.html

Host or Publisher Jo Watson