Bahar Orang
Policing and the Production of the Mental Health Crisis
Bahar Orang
Queen's University and University of Toronto
bahar.orang@medportal.ca
The past four years has seen a dramatic rise in the visibility of activism surrounding police defunding in the Western world, particularly in relation to police involvement in situations marked by emotional distress—the so-called “person in crisis” who interfaces with the mental health system. Through an interdisciplinary framework that engages political and Black feminist philosophy, this paper thinks critically about the enmeshments between the police and psychiatry. In particular, I offer an analysis of the “mental health crisis”, which police officers and psychiatrists are called upon to manage together. In the Toronto context where I work, a mental health crisis frequently leads to incarceration and coercion by police and/or by psychiatrists, as per mental health law. I ask: What happens when we think about a “person in crisis” as a political category, and the invocation of “crisis” as a political process? What kinds of logic make the mental health crisis legible? What, to the police and the ideological apparatuses from which the police extend, does safety mean and to whom is it granted? I construct a case study of the intersections of policing, psychiatry, and the mental health crisis through a close reading of archival, legal, and institutional documents associated with the Toronto police services and the Centre for Addiction and Mental health location in Toronto. I begin my analysis by theorizing the “mental health crisis,” both by interrogating the concept of crisis itself, and holding this in relation to the social and decolonial political philosophy of Sylvia Wynter’s “Man-as-Human” framework. I contextualize the “mental health crisis” as a profound threat to Man-as-Human and discuss the essential function of policing in this regard as the policing and preserving of the predominance of Man-as-Human. I also think with the mad and Black studies thinker Bruce La Marr Jurelle, who writes about “Reason” (2021) that is likewise essential to the construction of the “mental health crisis.” I am interested in how such a case study speaks to the paradigms of policing and mental health in non-Western contexts and am excited about the possibility of engaging such a conversation outside of Western institutions.
CAMH as Haunted: Policing, Property, and the Psychiatric Emergency Department
Bahar Orang
Queen's University and University of Toronto
bahar.orang@medportal.ca
In the 1800's, unpaid and incarcerated patient labourers built a boundary wall that enclosed Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (the largest psychiatric hospital in Canada) and materially separated it from the surrounding city. A subsection of the wall has been preserved and has come to be known as the "historic boundary wall.” This essay takes the wall as a "ghostly presence" to explore ongoing and historical issues of carcerality, colonialism, modernity, and gentrification. Ghosts, in
sociological terms, show up where injustice has happened and is still happening. Ghosts produce structures of feeling, and that which is incompletely knowable, but nonetheless actively lived and felt. As the sociologist Avery Gordon explains, “Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life [...] it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it” (7). Ghosts are not “simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure,” with which and with whom a transformative reckoning can take place and can lead us to “that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8). To encounter the ghost is to open oneself up to being changed. At the same time, ghosts are not only symbolic or metaphorical; their presence can be felt; they live in actual locations; and recognizing or repressing them has material, political, social, and key questions that inform the analysis include: How was the first iteration of CAMH as an asylum, modelled after prison architecture, essential to Canadian white supremacist nation-making and colonialism? How does that colonial trace still haunt CAMH? How does the contemporary vision of CAMH as a "blended urban village" align with the gentrification of the surrounding Parkdale neighbourhood, where mad, racialized, and poor people are dispossessed and displaced? How is the boundary wall still alive today? How do the police embody that boundary wall, now in a mobile, decentralized mode, but nonetheless continuing to discipline, segregate, and incarcerate? This essay is an interdisciplinary theory-building project. I bring sociology, mad studies, political theory, philosophy, and cultural studies to bear on tweets, speeches, institutional reports, and photographs. Through an interdisciplinary hauntological methodology that engages sociological and archival work, I argue that CAMH’s boundary wall has been renovated as a part of a gentrifying and neoliberalizing process and I explore the crucial underpinnings of racialized expropriation, dispossession, and extraction to CAMH’s ongoing project.
BIOGRAPHY
Bahar Orang is a psychiatrist working in Indigenous mental health in Toronto. She recently graduated from the University of Toronto residency program, where she was a trainee in both the clinician-scholar research tract and the clinical fellowship in reproductive psychiatry. She is also currently a PhD student and Vanier Scholar at Queen's University in Cultural Studies where her research broadly concerns anticolonial political theory. Further, she has an active creative practice outside of her clinical and scholarly work as a poet.