This is part two of a two-part interview with Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu. The first part is available here.
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Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu is a queer, disabled, autistic & mentally ill community organizer and graduate from Brown University. They’re the founder and executive director of Project LETS, an abolitionist project working to build non-carceral alternatives to the American mental healthcare system, which has been inspired by their experiences with it.
[This as-told-to has been edited and condensed]
I love that people genuinely think that psychiatry is anything more than fucking guessing. We don't know shit about the brain. There has been plentyofresearch that shows that there is no proof that this chemical imbalance theory is remotely true. There are studies that show that antidepressants, for example, are no more effective than a placebo, no more effective than peer support or therapy, and in some cases can cause significant harm. When we're talking about antipsychotics, some of the side effects include permanent movement disorders. It's like, “okay we're gonna force someone on a medication that could permanently alter the way that their body moves and functions,” and forcing someone into that without consent is a violent, terrible thing. My point here is so much of it, at least in my experience and many of the folks that I work with, was just like, “Let's start with this medication and this dosage; depending on how you're feeling, we can increase it or decrease it or, or change the medication…” There's no real fucking science behind it, and I'm someone who studied neuroscience in college. The thought that this is not something that could eventually be community controlled is beyond me, because we're doing nothing more than guessing.
People have very, very violent and unfounded beliefs about the mental health system and in thinking that there's this whole scientific process behind it. When you look through history, there's only been theories, there are only thoughts and ideas. We had people drilling holes in the head to release demons; we've never known, we've always guessed. There is no one universal truth when we're talking about this stuff, which is why the U.S. mental health system is almost more violent than any other system because we’ve tried to export what we think is the universal truth to everyone else in the world and actually change other cultures and other people's perceptions of their own distress, which is just psychiatric imperialism.
In developing the curriculum for peer-based support training, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu looked to pre-existed peer support programs, but found them lacking and perpetuating hierarchies that existed in traditional mental health treatments.
I started looking into what's known as the certified peer recovery specialist system. I find the whole thing super fucking problematic. First of all, a lot of it is deeply rooted in the medical model, and these super white western ideas of the mental health system and psychiatry. But on top of that, and perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of it, is it positions people who become peer specialists as the ones who are healed and recovered, and now they get to go and help the other sad mentally ill people who are struggling. I found that so fucked up. We all have to have the grace and the space to be able to move in and out of helper and receiving roles. And having this ideology that like, “I struggled and now I'm healed, and now I get to impart all my wisdom on these other people suffering” is literally replicating those dynamics that we're trying to get away from—the expert and patient kind of model.
I originally built the curriculum, and it was loosely based on some of the useful and non-problematic things from the peer specialist training, and then I just pulled from all sorts of places. It wasn't even my original intention for this to be political education; my original intention was to give people the skills to handle advocacy, peer support, one on one relationships and crisis moments. But people were coming in not knowing all of these things about the history of psychiatry and everything, and becoming radicalized through this training, and that felt like a huge win, and something that we wanted to keep pursuing.
Some of the Peer Health Mental Advocates (PMHAs) finished the training and were like, “Wait a minute. Can I have my own PMHA?” and I was like, “Yeah, of course you can.” So we had PMHAs supporting peers, and now they have PMHAs to support them. Some of us are helping others, some of us are helping and receiving support at the same time, some of us are just receiving right now. Then we started seeing peers who originally came to us in really fucking bad places who progressed so far and then were like, “I want to train as a PMHA, I want to give back in this way.” That's a really critical aspect when we're thinking about “solidarity not charity.” How can we not just be pitying people and giving them services, but also opening pathways for people to become involved and organize and become advocates in their own rights, whatever that looks like?
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