Team

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Merrick Pilling (he/him/his)

Merrick Pilling is an Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in Mad Studies and 2SLGBTQ+ experiences of social services and health care. His work employs an intersectional, anti-racist lens that emphasizes the importance of lived experience, relevance to the communities being researched, and making changes to the systems that create marginalization. He is the author of Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice and co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives.

In addition to his post-secondary teaching, Dr. Pilling has developed and delivered social justice-based curriculum for adult learners with direct service backgrounds in health care and social services on the following topics: social justice praxis in clinical chart documentation; intersectional, anti-oppressive approaches to delivering mental health services; trauma-informed care for 2SLGBTQ+ people who have experienced violence; and structural competence with trans and non-binary service users.

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Andrea Daley (she/her; they/them)

Andrea Daley is a Professor at the School of Social Work, Renison University College, at the University of Waterloo. She has published on social justice issues, including those impacting sexual and gender minority communities with a focus on access to equitable and good quality care; lesbian/queer women's experiences of psychiatric services; and gender, sexuality, race, and class and the interpretative nature of psychiatric chart documentation as it relates to psychiatric narratives of madness. She practices critical research methods to engage politics of knowledge building with communities toward the goal of social transformation. Andrea's work as a community mental health worker has been particularly influential in shaping her commitment to addressing the issues of power and oppression within the context of psychiatric care. She is co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives (Palgrave Macmillan) and Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection (University of Toronto Press).

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Lucy Costa (she/her)

Lucy Costa is deputy executive director of a non-profit service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada. She works as an advocate promoting the rights of mental health service users/survivors, as well as encouraging critical analysis about service user inclusion in the mental health sector. She has produced education curricula for many stakeholders. She has written a number of articles and blogs and is co-editor of Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection (University of Toronto Press) as well as a special edition of the Journal of Ethics and Mental Health (2019).

Maya Ghion (she/her)

Maya Ghion is a 4th year Social Development Studies student completing a specialization in Social Work at Renison University College. She provides administrative support for the Psychiatric Documentation and Systemic Oppression in Mental Health Care workshop. In addition, she has served as research assistant on other projects including the Renison Academic Library Survey and through her co-op has been a part of various projects and initiatives including an Online Service Learning research project.