If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The Working Group on Community Mental Health has been meeting at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis each month since October 2024 as a place for community mental health workers to reflect on our experience. We analyze features of our own workplaces and features of the system in which we work, for the purposes of doing better work and imagining a better system. We come together with a shared belief that the community mental health system is both critically important and pathologically dysfunctional. Under the current system both workers and patients suffer — frequently in interrelated ways. One of the important sources of dysfunction that affects workers and patients is the fractured nature of the system, a product of many historical forces including austerity and privatization. For that reason and others, our group consists of supportive housing workers, case managers, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, peer counselors, art therapists, shelter workers, social practitioners that work for nonprofit day programs, housing programs, public and private hospitals, EMS, street outreach teams, mobile crisis teams, LGBTQ clinics, nonprofit and city-run shelters, FQHCs, ACT and IMT teams, settlement houses and early childhood education programs. We welcome anyone whose work is related to the systems set up to help, support or manage people living with serious mental illnesses.

Sometimes we read and discuss the readings, sometimes people bring their own institutional case studies for group analysis, sometimes we play a “game” or otherwise simulate or investigate how our specific institutions have the same problems, have opposite problems, have related problems, share problems, pass problems around and around in a circle, how they make problems for each other or become each other’s  problems.

The group is facilitated by Chris Landry, Chloe Murtagh and Jesse Newberg. The group typically meets on the last Wednesday of the month at 6:30pm.