This Saturday, June 20, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, will hold a Mass Digital Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington, endeavoring to be the largest online gathering of poor and low income people and allies of conscience in the nation’s history.
I’ll be joining in this historic event, and thought it worth sharing why I see participation in this event as a form of mental health advocacy. On its face, the Poor People’s Campaign doesn’t seem to focus on mental health. Why do I promote their work and advocacy, perhaps seemingly more than I promote the work of more traditional mental health-focused organizations?
When I finished my first book tour after the publication of Christ on the Psych Ward, I reflected on what I’d heard and what my next steps would be. At the time, I wrote about how much I had learned about the lack of resources and access for mental healthcare in many communities, and about the ways in which chronic homelessness and mass incarceration stand-in, in a harmful way, for a functioning mental healthcare system for far too many people in this country. In Grace is a Pre-Existing Condition, I write more about systemic inequities as well as my own experiences with crushing medical debt caused by a lack of insurance coverage for my “pre-existing” mental health condition.
My experience of mental healthcare is in many ways a privileged one in this country. Even so, the mental and emotional wear and tear of my experience with lack of insurance, medical debt, and reliance on social safety nets gave me just a small window into the detrimental impacts of unjust healthcare systems, not only on the economic health but on the mental and physical health of millions of my poor, uninsured, and underinsured neighbors.
I strongly believe that the Poor People’s Campaign is creating the kind of multi-faith, moral fusion movement that can address these inequities, while connecting the dots between these and other ways in which we, as a society, so often fail to uplift the very people which the gospel compels us serve. The Campaign’s demands include many of the priorities that I emphasized in Grace is a Pre-Existing Condition, including:
Medicaid expansion and the just and equitable provision of healthcare for all
Equal treatment and healthcare for people with disabilities, including mental illnesses such as the bipolar disorder I’ve been diagnosed with
Voting rights and the accessibility of the ballot, which will allow us to truly vote for mental health
An end to the system of mass incarceration
What’s more, the Poor People’s Campaign understands that all of these and many more are not isolated issues but are rather part of a larger system of injustice, one constituted of systemic racism, poverty & inequality, ecological devastation, militarism & the war economy, and false narrative of religious nationalism. As I write in Grace is a Pre-Existing Condition:
By naming these systems, we begin the process of diagnosing them, treating them, and caring for the people impacted by them. And if it is true, as a psychiatrist one said to me, that diagnoses are stories we tell about a complex web of symptoms and experiences and treatments, then diagnosis and care involves telling a story that leads us toward wholeness and healing.
We have to ‘think systems’ in order to diagnose systemic pathologies. We have to look at the many different systems impacting a particular person or situation. And then we choose where to intervene, where to put energy, where to try to affect the system, while being mindful of the intersections and interactions between our interventions and other parts of the system (pg. 65)
These past few weeks have driven home for me, in an even more intense way, that mental health advocacy cannot be narrowly focused. Read Britney Wilson’s powerful article in The Nation, or simply peruse the #BlackDisabledLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter, and you will very quickly learn about the relationship between police violence, race, and mental illness. Read any platform related to ending said violence, and you will see calls for alternative forms of mental health crisis response. Examine the inequities of our health insurance and healthcare systems, and you will soon find yourself learning about racial inequities and their very real health impacts.
We cannot be mental health advocates in this moment in history without also speaking up and speaking out on matters of racism, police violence, mass incarceration, and the spiderweb of systems which surround all these. That’s why I wrote Grace is a Pre-Existing Condition. And that’s why I’m joining the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, for their June 20 Digital Mass Gathering and Moral March. You can join, too. Just go to www.june2020.org to learn more and RSVP.
