Beyond Diagnosis: A Transformative Mental Health Curriculum
How IDHA weaves lived experience, social movements, and practical tools into a different way of understanding distress
ABOUT THE CURRICULUM
This curriculum exists because too much of what gets called “mental health” has been stripped of history, relationship, and power. IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum brings us back to a more honest ground—one that understands distress not as individual failure, but as something shaped by racism, ableism, violence, dislocation, and survival. It weaves together lived experience, movement knowledge, and practical tools to help us think, feel, and act differently—locally, relationally, and with care. Over eight modules, the curriculum invites us to see mental health as something we practice together, rooted in dignity, connection, and the possibility of real transformation in our lives and work.
IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum draws upon knowledge and traditions across a range of disciplines, social movements, geographies, and perspectives to advance approaches to mental health care rooted in humanity, care, and support.
It centers the impact of structural oppression on our well-being, amplifies visionary voices of lived experience alongside research and professional perspectives, and introduces concrete tools, modalities, and language for addressing issues that so often end up medicalized. It is locally-grounded, trauma-informed, attuned to power dynamics, and celebrates diverse ways of thinking about mental health.
Over the course of eight modules, you will be introduced to a systemic, historical analysis of mental health, including how racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression intersect with mental health; diverse narratives of lived experience and the powerful impact of grassroots movements, past and present; a variety of community-based and peer-led practices that support healing; and a transformative mental health lens and how to apply it to your life and work.
This curriculum exists because too much of what gets called “mental health” has been stripped of history, relationship, and power. IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum brings us back to a more honest ground—one that understands distress not as individual failure, but as something shaped by racism, ableism, violence, dislocation, and survival. It weaves together lived experience, movement knowledge, and practical tools to help us think, feel, and act differently—locally, relationally, and with care. Over eight modules, the curriculum invites us to see mental health as something we practice together, rooted in dignity, connection, and the possibility of real transformation in our lives and work
.What You’ll Learn
Construct a working definition for “transformative mental health”
Explain the value of lived experience as a central source of knowledge in transforming mental health
Critically examine the historical origins and modern-day implications of a medicalized approach to mental health in the United States and globally
Review how psychology and psychiatry have been leveraged to oppress historically marginalized groups (e.g. femmes and women, Black and Indigenous People of Color, LGBTQIA+ community members), as well as the modern-day manifestations of these histories
Demonstrate the impact of various social movements in liberating individuals with lived experience and making concrete changes both within and outside the system
Interpret a range of mental health experiences (e.g. trauma, altered states, suicide) through the lens of transformative mental health, in contrast with diagnostic language
Analyze the dominant Western medical conceptualization of care and review numerous peer-led, community-based care approaches that exist today
Identify strategies and construct values to further transform mental health on personal, collective, and societal levels
Skills You’ll Gain
Honoring and integrating lived experience in care work
Creatively assessing the unique strengths of various care approaches and tools, and which to consider based on context
Examining power and privilege and how it shows up in practice
Approaching individual and collective stories through a lens of meaning making
Holding complexity and validating multiple truths at the same time
Respecting agency and choice
Embracing uncertainty and sitting with discomfort
Find me in my public/private practice:
Really appreciate this approach to centering structural oppression in mental health discourse. The point about distress being shaped by racism and ableism rather than individual failure flips the typical medical model on its head. Back when I volunteered at a community health clinic, I saw how diagnostic labels often obscured the real stressors people were dealing with—housing insecurity, discrimination, lack of opprotunities. Integrating lived experience with systems analysis seems way more grounded than just pathologizing peoples reactions to systemic violence.
This looks amazing and I wonder as a parent if it would be helpful. I write about my experiences as well as others.