Component Evaluation: Intersectional Analysis

Timing: 30 Minutes

Download Beckman’s piece titled “What If?  …Cancer Prisons” as a prompt for your students in a creative writing or cartooning exercise.

Ask your students to respond to Beckman’s satirical treatment of the criminalization of mental difference and substance use.  Encourage them to use humour (carefully!) to delve deeper into the ways in which people’s experiences of the mental health system are shaped by one of the following: race, class, gender or sexuality.  Then bring student cartoons and creative writing pieces together to demonstrate and discuss how an intersectional analysis of oppression helps us understand the different ways power operates within the mental health system. This can be done in class or uploaded to a course website or discussion board.