“Mad World – The Politics of Mental Health” by Micha Frazer-Carroll tells us: how mental distress is an overwhelmingly isolating endeavour under our current conditions. It can cut us off from our communities, make us feel trapped, take over our lives, and see us further secluded within the system – both physically and metaphorically. It can pile on shame and trauma, turning our days into a struggle to simply stay alive. How then do we take such alienating and debilitating experiences and turn them outwards to politicise them? Our economic and social systems, characterised by private ownership, wage labour, competition and the pursuit of profit, harm each and every one of us, pushing people to choose between inhumane working conditions or death, into dangerous living conditions or houselessness, destroying our environment, sanctioning and normalising all kinds of death, allowing a limited few to accumulate more wealth than they could ever need or spend and around 10% of the population into extreme poverty. These conditions are largely inflicted on young people, women, children and people living in the ‘Global South’. Neoliberal austerity has seen healthcare, youth centres, housing budgets and benefits slashed, depriving us from access to bodily autonomy, community, safety, dignity and joy. This is the context in which depression has become the leading global cause of disability. The interacting systems of oppression that are the status quo affect us on a psychological and interpersonal level, infiltrating and corrupting how we fundamentally think about one another. The insidious logics of extraction, exploitation, scarcity and competition impact how we talk, befriend, work and otherwise interact with each other. Few of us know how it is to truly experience freedom and agency, to live without fear of punishment or violence, and to really flourish. Looking at mental health as a ‘social construct’ does not mean that these experiences are not ‘real’ but rather that they do not constitute a fixed or objective category across space and time. Like race, gender, all illness and other forms of deviance from the ‘norm’, the concepts of mental illness have been moulded in a particular social, political and economic context. If we do not politicise this reality, we cannot address the root causes of suffering or harm, nor provide us with the tools to transform these. No scientific or moral ‘common sense’ produces itself within a vacuum, free from the interference of social systems we are embedded in. The ‘biological versus social’ is an artificial binary – there is no social without the biological and vice versa; social experiences are inscribed on our physical ‘bodyminds’. Emotional literacy is one of the key channels to understanding the intrinsic link between bodies and minds. Collaborative, cooperative and collective construction of knowledge and participation allows for the humility and solidarity of understanding different realities and truths and how they can enrich our own. Community and creativity can support us in holding pain and grief at the same time as building new ways to navigate through them, such as relational care and collective hope. With this in mind, our specific objectives of this project are to: • Explore topics that affect (young) people’s well-being and well-living, such as current wars & genocides, pandemic, colonialism, late-stage capitalism, climate injustice and gender inequality • Develop an understanding of personal and social emotions, how emotional experience, literacy and expression is also affected by different axes of oppression, power and privilege • Generate a lived experience of collectivist community simultaneously holding joy, pain, grief and hope through a decolonial and anti-oppressive lens • Co-create artistic and/or playful tools for transformation using socioaffective methodologies, pedagogies of pleasure, peace education models and cultures of care With staggering data about the impacts of recent world affairs on young people: living through a pandemic, experiencing wars and genocides or watching them on a screen, eco-anxiety mounting and entering our dictionaries, class and poverty having disproportionate impact on mental well-being, and capitalism clutching at our mental health by packaging it in individualist “wellness” tropes, Otra Escuela believes in collectivising and decolonising our reactions and actions. If we can understand our well-being not as part of us or something that belongs to us, but something done to us, and something shared rather than something secluded, we can find solace, solidarity and solution also through a collective response. Dr Ayesha Khan tells us: "Just like any life-giving, life-sustaining energy that circulates within an ecosystem, we depend on each other to have hope. Like survival, hope is a collective responsibility, not an individual burden. We have to play our role in seeking out community where such hope can be co-created."