Racial Trauma and Psychosis
Racial Trauma and Psychosis
by Irish Forum Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Date: 13th March 2021
Time: 10:30am – 1pm
Location: Online
Price: €20
Working in the Community with Psychosis and Racial Trauma
About this Event
The Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) and the USEMI Racial Trauma Clinic work jointly to deliver specialist talking and art therapy services in deprived areas across inner city London.
The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy have invited Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz and Earl Pennycooke to speak about these innovative and valuable services.
In the disenfranchised areas where this work is happening, the speakers will share their experiences of encountering a high proportion of people who present with complex trauma and severe mental illness and receive little support besides medication. They will also introduce Irish audiences to the work of the Psychosis Therapy Project, a psychoanalytic clinic of psychosis in the community and USEMI (“to speak” in Swahili) which aim to meet the specific needs of those whose experience of severe mental illness is impacted by race, ethnicity and culture.
The central and highly valuable nature of both these projects is that they hold questions of subjectivity, voice and visibility as their central concerns.
The Psychosis Therapy Project: A Psychoanalytic Clinic of Psychosis in the Community
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz will give an overview of the PTP’s psychoanalytic interventions in the community since its foundation in 2013. She will discuss some of the organisational, theoretical and clinical tenets and challenges that have shaped the development of the project so far.
Everyday Racial Trauma and Psychosis: Diagnosis and Presentation
Earl Pennycooke will speak about racial trauma from the perspective of his lived experience of racism and show how the systemic disavowal of racism in society perpetuates the oppression and the silencing of those who are victims of it. He will discuss the impact of this fact on the mental wellbeing of communities of colour and the ways in which it informs the clinic of racial trauma. He will also wonder how this gets played out in psychoanalysis as a whole.
2 CPD points will be awarded.
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst, a translator and a frontline clinician working with severe mental illness in the community. She is the founder and clinical director of the Psychosis Therapy Project. Her work as a translator includes a number of psychoanalytic texts such as Dominique Scarfone’s Laplanche: An Introduction (2015), The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious (2016) and Laurence Kahn’s Psychoanalysis, Apathy and the Postmodern Patient (2018)
Earl Pennycooke has worked in a variety of psychotherapeutic settings, from brief work within the NHS, to managing front line addiction and mental health services. He is currently working in private practice and is co-director of the Psychosis Therapy Project and co-founder and director of USEMI.
If you or a family member are affected by these topics, please refer to the Irish Forum Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy’s website www.ifpp.ie to consult a therapist.
#community #psychology #psychosis #racial_equity #mental_health_awareness