The Right to Make Meaning: Mysticism, Art, Culture, and Agency- 3-4pm The Shape of Air: Colonial Psychiatry, Medication Violence, and Film as Witness - Jennifer Abbott
- 4-4:30pm Reframing Mysticism: An Ethic of Agency and the Other in Psychosis - Jacob Sirkisoon Prescott, LMSW
The Shape of Air: Colonial Psychiatry, Medication Violence, and Film as Witness - Jennifer Abbott
The Shape of Air is a feature documentary in development by award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Abbott, centring her son — a remarkable Cree artist treated for schizophrenia who died in 2025 from the side-effects of a state-mandated psychiatric medication. This presentation combines film footage, animated artwork, and personal testimony to trace the violence at the intersection of colonization and psychiatry, asking how dominant mental health systems function as instruments of ongoing colonial dispossession. At the heart of the film is Weston's own visual art — animated throughout the documentary, exerting pressure on the legal and psychiatric processes that governed his life — as the one space those systems could neither classify nor confine, and the only realm in which he remained fully sovereign. Freed from the demand to explain or conclude, art is proposed here not as illustration but as witness: capable of holding what institutional language has spent centuries trying to erase. Attendees will be invited to consider the film as both evidence and intervention, and to explore opportunities to participate in or support its production.
Reframing Mysticism: An Ethic of Agency and the Other in Psychosis - Jacob Sirkisoon Prescott, LMSW
This presentation will offer a critical analysis of mystical conceptualizations of psychosis, while utilizing the colloquially named “AI Psychosis” to argue the importance of an individual’s relationship to Lacan’s Other in recovery. As the ex-patient movement has gained momentum in Europe and the United States, many first-person accounts of psychosis have been uplifted, along with a mystical reframing of the reductionist, traditional, psychiatric etiologies of extreme states. While spiritual accounts of psychosis have the capacity to empower many in recovery, fetishizing interpretations of mysticism’s impact hazard overshadowing the importance of centering an individual’s lived experience of the Other. Drawing from Amy Hollywood and Brett Fimiani, I will establish an intra-psychic structural link between mysticism and psychosis, emphasize the sociological context of “AI psychosis”, and consequently advocate for a treatment ethic that centers the person(s) right to co-construct an individualized narrative of struggle.
