Date & time
7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
This event is free.
Oscar Peterson Concert Hall
7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Yes - See details
IS THE CURRENT MENTAL HEALTH IDEOLOGY COMPROMISING THE HEALTH OF OUR YOUNGER GENERATIONS?
Sami Timimi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author of the new book Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress, and Neurodiversity, is the keynote speaker at the AMI-Quebec Annual Mental Health Forum.
Dr Timimi has written 40 book chapters and six books on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems and cross-cultural psychiatry. His prolific work includes criticism on the politics of mental health, the medicalization of people’s social and emotional competence, and the role of the mental health industry in creating damaging treatment traps.
Dr. Timimi observes that distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment; more and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.
“It's hard to be ‘normal’ kid these days” says Dr Timimi: “if you’re judged too lively, you are ‘hyperactive’; too quiet, you may be ‘depressed’; a bit shy, you’re probably ‘autistic’… in many Western societies, to be a kid these days is to be closely monitored and scrutinised for your level of performance. When things are judges ‘not right’ by someone, you can then be exposed to a variety of assessments and procedures to determine what’s wrong, broken and dysfunctional in you”.
Instead of the prevalent outlook of mental health, Dr Timimi presents a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress. He is calling “for radical shift, revolution no less, in which there will be no more use of psychiatric diagnoses, dramatic decrease in the use of psychiatric medication, and the promotion to the public of a narrative that will help to rehabilitate emotions back into the sphere if the ordinary and/or understandable”.
For the past 48 years, AMI-Québec has been committed to helping families manage the effects of mental illness through support, education, guidance and advocacy. By promoting understanding, we work to dispel the stigma still surrounding mental illness, thereby helping to create communities that offer new hope for meaningful lives.
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