Grant: Knowledge Translation Supplement

Research and first-person accounts have repeatedly shown that discriminatory beliefs and practices directed toward those who have received a psychiatric diagnosis and mental health services are widespread within Canadian society. As a result, those deemed "mentally ill" are frequently marginalized within the health care system and in their lives more generally. Our knowledge translation project proposes to address this crisis by developing and disseminating web-based teaching resources that build on CIHR-funded research on the history of deinstitutionalization. These teaching resources will be designed to facilitate their integration into the college- and university-based education of a diverse array of practitioners whose daily work will bring them into contact with people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis. We will draw on a wide array of research materials in creating the resources, including written first-person accounts by people who were moved from institutional settings into the community, publications by organizations working on behalf of consumer/survivors in various Canadian communities, videotaped interviews with consumer/survivor activists and advocates, and policy documents. In this project we will work collaboratively with people who have direct experience of receiving mental health services as well as with instructors who are interested in incorporating the learning resources into their courses, building on and extending relationships we initiated with a small seed grant. The central objective of our project is to foster new understandings among such practitioners of the ways in which professional power, social and economic circumstances, and intolerance of difference have operated to disempower and stigmatize mental health clients in the past and continue to do so in the present. Our goal is to improve the mental health services and supports that are available in communities so that people's wellbeing is better supported by them.