Abstract: In spite of the promises of the community mental health movement and deinstitutionalization,
outcomes among those labeled with serious mental illness (SMI), including schizophrenia,
remain abysmally poor: unemployment, poverty, precarity and, in many countries, criminalization
and incarceration, are the norm. Against this backdrop, this presentation takes up
the question of what it would really take to fundamentally transform systems of support,
focusing on "non-reformist reforms" in the areas of social welfare policy, evidence
and meaning, and epistemic justice.
About the speaker: Nev Jones is faculty in the School of Social Work and Department
of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh with interdisciplinary training in continental
philosophy, community psychology and medical anthropology. An activist-scholar, her
work focuses on dismantling carcerality, structural violence and epistemic injustice
in mental health and adjacent social welfare systems and services.
