Amplifying The Mental Health Of Black University Students: A Black, Mad And Disability Studies Intersectional Inquiry

In the UK, Black communities are disproportionately impacted by disabling barriers and all too readily end up lifeless in police cells, restrained in maximum security psychiatric hospitals and excluded from educational settings because racism sits at the core of categorising and responding to their distress. According to a broad coalition of NGOs, Think Tanks and mental health professionals (September, 2023), this necessitates long-term political investment in UK laws and policies that move away from biomedical/individual models to social and cultural models, recognising and addressing the profound impact discrimination, poverty, intergenerational trauma, and marginalisation has on mental health.

Affirmed, too, by a ground-breaking joint report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the World Health Organization (WHO) they urgently advocate for rethinking how mental ill-health is understood, diagnosed, and treated globally because of the deleterious effect on people’s human rights (October, 2023). This project – Amplifying Black Student Mental Health - brings together for the first time, academics engaged with theory and methods from Black, Mad and Disability Studies – in collaboration with Black Disability Justice consultants and Black co-researchers – to address the OHCHR and WHO’s urgent call by focusing on the mental health of Black students across the lifecycle at four pre-and-post 92 English universities: the University of Durham, the University of Nottingham, the University of East London, and the University of Hertfordshire.