READING GROUP:
COVID, War, Political Upheaval, Racism: The Moving Frame
This reading group creates space for clinicians in community mental health settings to think about working with clients managing issues that have risen over the past year, including but not limited to the impacts of COVID, war, political tumult, and racism, while processing these same problems for themselves. The therapeutic frame is conceptualized by parameters of space and location (i.e., the office), but what if these include changes in the sociopolitical frame? Participants will review articles and reflections on the aforementioned topics to discuss.
NCSPP is aware that historically psychoanalysis has either excluded or pathologized groups outside of the dominant population in terms of age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, and size. As an organization, we are committed to bringing awareness to matters of anti-oppression, inequity, inequality, diversity, and inclusion as they pertain to our educational offerings, our theoretical orientation, our community, and the broader world we all inhabit.
Presenters Response:
Working in community mental health settings often involve services to historically marginalized populations. This reading group serves to engage clinicians in discussions about how events in our society and world have affected clients and ourselves and how we might be more mindful and present about the impacts of the time we are living in now.
Meiyang Kadaba is a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco. As a "third-culture kid," she pays particular attention to the profound way that our sociocultural contexts shape our sense of self and our experiences in the world. Her practice is at the intersection of psychoanalytic and liberation psychologies.
This reading group is open to clinical staff and trainees working in community mental health settings.
For program related questions contact Geetali Chitre, Psy.D. at drgeetalichitre@gmail.com.
Community Mental Health Committee
This committee is a group of clinicians who are interested in the relationship between Community Mental Health (CMH) and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is anchored in a quality of close care and attention that is often systematically denied to members of disadvantaged communities and difficult to locate in stressed, under-resourced public mental health clinics. CMH clinicians hold the tension between a variety of institutional, social, and political pressures and constraints. Meanwhile, psychoanalytic thinking sometimes misses the significance of these systemic influences on individual lives.
There is important work to be done in bridging the theoretical and concrete gaps between community work and psychoanalytic practice. The CMH committee aspires to create a more inclusive home for CMH clinicians within the NCSPP community. In turn, we advocate for greater investment from psychoanalysis in the projects of CMH practitioners- in terms of both theory and practical engagement.
We seek to identify the needs and interests of our various partners both in CMH and NCSPP. We invite our community members to engage with us by emailing us at cmh@ncspp.org .