Interview with Vanessa Jackson

Interview with Vanessa Jackson who is an African-American women who shares with us her liberation journey. Her personal journey goes from trauma to power wounding. She is an activist and a “narrative therapist”. In this interview she shows to be quite critical with the traditional clinical approach to people who have been carrying wounds from systemic oppression, especially from inherited slavery. She says: “Dr. Cartwright was an expert in slave medicine and based on his observations and reports from overseers, he described a mental illness that caused slaves to run away from their natural condition of enslavement. As a pro-slavery advocate, Dr. Cartwright believed that such behavior could only be characterized as mental illness. While this term sounds completely outrageous to us today, I would argue that such terms as oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorders which are widely use to describe, medicate and incarcerate children and adolescents are modern day examples of pathologizing efforts to liberate oneself and these labels blind us to the oppression that marginalized groups, like enslaved persons and children experience when they lack power and agency.”  Full Text