SPAT OUT ! A Conversation About Institutional Racism in the Psychotherapy Field

"The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That's the good life." 

Joy James.

“Spat Out”: A Conversation About Institutional Racism in the Psychotherapy Field

An online (Zoom) gathering with the five claimants in the legal case against Metanoia Institute. 

You can see the campaign HERE.

Two years ago, the five of us - former staff and faculty at Metanoia Institute - left the organisation after raising serious concerns about racism, inequity, and systemic harm.

This followed a long and painful process in which we experienced being silenced, marginalised, and ultimately spat out by an institution we cared about and worked hard to serve.

When it became clear that our voices would not be heard internally, we made the decision to take legal action because of the multiple harms caused.

We are now pursuing this case further and raising funds to support the ongoing legal process.

But this event is not just about our story. It’s an invitation to a broader, open conversation about how institutional racism continues to shape the psychotherapy profession, and what it takes to speak out and stand together in response and refuse these realities.

We want to speak honestly about:

• What it means to experience being sidelined for speaking up - we think of the work of Sara Ahmed and complaint.
• Why the legal route became necessary and what it demands and what it might mean - you might have questions.
• How we can challenge and change the culture of our field, in ways that centre those most impacted.

If you are a practitioner, student, educator, activist, supervisor, client or simply someone who cares - we hope you’ll join us to hear our stories as we invite you to be part of an urgent conversation.  

All proceeds from this event will go directly toward our legal fundraising campaign.

Let’s come together to name what’s happening — and imagine what could be different.

Donations can be made HERE.

"These conditions belong to us all"   

(Foluke Taylor in Unruly Therapeutic).  

There is different study, work, tending and activism for each of us to do from our various social locations.  

Some essential background reading: 

• The Life and Deep Time of Still Hear by Foluke Taylor
• What Feels Right to Us: A Black history month statement from Still Hear
• Gail Lewis responds to Metanoia's Black History Month web page.  

Some preparation reading for white participants:

• Colonial Defensiveness: Exposing the Supremacy-Preserving Reflex Beneath White Fragility  CHRISTIAN ORTIZ
• The Grief of Unbecoming White by Christian ZacaTecho Ortiz

Some relevant reading/listening + companions to think with

• The Life and Deep Time of Still Hear by Foluke Taylor 
• The Transformation of Silence into Action  by Audre Lorde
• The Grief of Unbecoming White by Christian ZacaTecho Ortiz
• Complaint Curriculum by Sara Ahmed
• Complicating the White Therapist - Decommissioning whiteness in therapeutic practice and thought by Robert Downes
• The Existential Absurdity of White Antiracist Racist Anger: Tarrying in Narcissism by Betty Stonemason
• On Listening – Five Thoughts. An audio recording of Gail Lewis reading their text.. Gail collaborated with the artist Sonia Boyce during Radio Ballads and this text was originally commissioned for the Radio Ballads: Songs for Change publication. 
• Podcast - Couched: Surviving Institutional Failures: Expanding the Psychoanalytic Canon - with Foluke Taylor and Joyoti Rao. 
• Black Rage, White Gaze: How Can Black Lives, Historically Reified, Have ‘Room to Breathe’ in Contemporary Psychoanalysis?
  by Fembe Nanji-Rowe
• Must We Drown in the Wake? Notes on Addressing Racism at Psychoanalytic Institutes by Tracy D. Morgan
• OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK – BEYOND THE RHETORIC OF OTHERNESS: LATA MANI
• Black Liberation Media: Exigent Sadism and Sexuality Beyond Consent ft Drs. Avgi Saketopoulou and Lara Sheehi
• Re-imagining the Space and Context for a Therapeutic Curriculum – A Sketch - Foluke Taylor & Robert Downes 
  

Previous TRS events that are also relevant and some related resources: 

White Psychosis

• Open Access version of Kehinde Andrews article The Psychosis of Whiteness: the celluloid hallucinations of Amazing Graze and Belle (published in the Journal of Black Studies in 2016). The article inspired the making of the documentary.
• Chapter of Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake On Blackness and Being. This first chapter describes the notion of the wake.
• Christina Sharpe reading an excerpt from In The Wake No.1.
  
• Christina Sharpe reading an excerpt from In The Wake No.2.
• African American philosopher, George Yancy, breaks down what is required of whiteness to unravel from the psychosis of whiteness.

• Maternal Incoherence by Joy James
• Birthing Racial Difference by Gail Lewis
• Mothering not motherhood by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
• Experiments in Radical Hospitality Research Seminar: M. NourbeSe Philip
• Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values by Joy James
• Re-imagining the Space for a Therapeutic Curriculum – a Sketch by Foluke Taylor & Robert Downes

The Implicated Subject & Book launches : Unruly Therapeutic & Decolonizing Therapy.

aja monet because poetry is essential 

“It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing. The strategy is no different than bombing Cambodia to keep the Northern Vietnamese from making their big push. And since not history, not anthropology, not social sciences seem capable in a strong and consistent way to grapple with that problem, it may very well be left to the artists to do it.”

― Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View,” Portland State University’s Oregon Public Speakers Collection: “Black Studies Center public dialogue. Pt. 2,” May 30, 1975