Olivia Michel (she/they):
the face behind the posts
I am an MSW candidate at Hunter Silberman School of Social Work. As long time lover of the arts and user of mental health services, I have long seen the benefit of creative outlets for expression of our emotions. As the grandchild of social workers and the child of a supportive housing industry leader, I was greatly inspired to join a field where the focus was on ending cycles of oppression and reducing recidivism. In 2020 I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Work and Theatre Arts from McDaniel College.
As a queer girl of color, I was used to all of my therapists being white and straight. I found it really hard to connect with them, and I found talk therapy could be pretty stifling. Sometimes I would run out of things to say or felt like I couldn't talk about my identity as black or queer, especially because it felt so "deviant" to be the other in comparison.
Many of the founding fathers of the most prevalent psychological theories like Erik Erikson saw homosexuality as deviant behavior (Berzoff et. al, 2016, pp. 114). Even Freud, who saw humans as innately bisexual (Freud, 1905) has had his accepting beliefs suppressed in favor of those that were misogynistic. Their research and theories stemmed from their work with upper- or middle-class clients who were White-European clients, or of White-European descent. Their work was ethnocentric, Eurocentric, ableist, sexist, heterosexist, and often transphobic.
This website and our zine were created for the Silberman Practice Lab Decolonizing Social Work Practice Knowledge - Contribution project. It comes out of a place of love, care, and understanding for QTBIPOC2SIA+ and religious minority folks. The purpose of this project is to help QTBIPOC2SIA+ and religious minority folks on either side of the desk or the couch to feel seen, heard, and accepted in the mental health field. Here you are not deviant, unless you want to be, here you are defiant! Here you can defy whatever those negative outcomes the fathers of modern psychology expected of us for not conforming to their rigid ideas.
