Watch: Ameil Joseph’s Perspectives on Peace lecture

This year, in commemoration of the UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the Office of Human Rights and Equity Services’ Accessibility Program hosted a public lecture delivered by Ameil Joseph, Assistant Professor in McMaster’s School of Social Work.

Joseph’s lecture, entitled “Violent Interventions: Neo-colonization in contemporary forensic mental health and the (re)production of difference,” explored the impact and legacy of colonial history on institutions such as the mental health system.

He argued that these institutions support and reinforce existing inequities that impact racialized communities and particularly those experiencing the mental health system.

He explored whose voices take centre stage in the media – people like psychiatrists, medical practitioners and other experts, while those with mental health issues are rendered silent. Their past experiences of abuse, forced confinement, restraint and socio-economic locations are made invisible, erasing their social, economic and political contexts.

Joseph illustrated his argument by calling on media examples. He refered to Howard Hyde’s death in 2007 at the hands of law enforcement officers in Nova Scotia while he resisted transfer to court, and to Tennyson Obih, a Nigerian migrant to the United Kingdom who killed a police officer.

By way of explanation for this tragic turn of events, the media reported that Mr. Obih was not taking his medication or complying with treatment. However, Joseph argued that if we were to examine Obih’s life more closely “we might be able to highlight some of the important material problems related to income disparities and access to resources for racialized immigrants. We might also discuss how these then become reduced to ‘risk factors for psychosis.’ In other words, the violence may be the manifestation of longer-term systemic issues”.

The lecture was part of the Accessibility Program’s ongoing commitment to expanding the conversation around disability and to explore and create a platform for more complex and intersectional conversations around the experiences of persons with disabilities in Canada.

For the full lecture, please visit the Office of Human Rights and Equity Services’ website at: hres.mcmaster.ca.