Founder & Podcaster: Atypical Dikkatein | Community Building: EquiLead | Fellow: Oxfam, TRD x CREA | Co-creator: G@WI x UN Women India | Feminist Practitioner | Neuroqueer
Earlier this month, I was invited to MH360 - a mental health festival organised by The Red Door. In our youth-led panel, "Pride X: The Personal is the Political," we, the young people, talked about our lived experiences and how intersectional marginalisation impacts our emotional, psychological and physical well-being. Mental health and the therapeutic space are inherently political. Being queer and autistic impacts all walks of my life, and my fundamental right to live with safety and dignity. So, we can't divorce mental health from politics. Further, our trauma and distress are individualised and pathologised by society, and the bio-medical model, and ultimately, the burden to heal and navigate systemic exclusion falls on us, which further isolates us. As vulnerable and marginalised individuals, our exclusion is due to the barriers in society, not due to inadequacies within us. Ideally, diversity should be celebrated; people shouldn't be punished for being different and forced to conform, which leads to more trauma. As social beings, everyone deserves support and care, so do queer and disabled people. This collective care can only be co-created with each other. When we come from a place of marginalisation with a traumatic past, we will hurt each other, but how we transform that pain and grow together to build solidarities is the important work that needs to be done. For this, we have to humanise each other, and practice self as well as mutual accountability. Unless we build strands of solidarity amongst us, we can't fight systemic issues by individualising them and putting the onus on marginalised folks. We can't achieve collective liberation in isolation. None of us are free, until all of us are free. #CommunityBuilding #Conversations #Neuroqueerness #Queerness #Diversity #QueerRights #DisabilityRights #DisabilityInclusion #IntersectionalFeminism Oxfam in Asia Asia Centre Atypical Dikkatein: A Conversation Podcast
Love what you have written, Soumya!
Hear hear!
👩🏻💻 Founder, Beyond Barriers Education 💡 Researching & Writing at the intersections of Education, Disability & Society 📲 Social Media Manager, iCanStudy
9mo👏