New Series: Understanding relationships with poverty, homelessness and trauma with Aaron Munro

VSNT faculty Aaron Munro (and guests) begin a new series based on his book Bad Manners. The book and the series are presented through Aaron’s personal stories as a queer/trans activist working in Canadas’s poorest urban neighbourhood. The series encounters his transition from female to male, and what he has learned over 17 years of work about trauma, addiction, violence, poverty, opioid deaths, and mental health stigma – based entirely on the grace and relationships he experienced with the shelter-less people he worked with.

Excerpt of first story we will discuss:

“And so, I met Laura, and my life changed. Laura was a woman who lived in the DTES (Downtown Eastside), and she was heavily addicted to crack cocaine. She was someone who heard voices, which didn’t say very nice things to her. Her own head told her repeatedly of her failings and society managed to keep up in stride with these voices. The fact we separate what voices say and how people experience our negative relations to them feels like the definition of insanity to me. We pathologize people so much, we can’t imagine that our ways of being with them might affect them. Why is it so hard once someone has been labelled with mental health issues, addiction, race, or gender issues for society to imagine that environmental factors or how we treat them is creating the condition that is harming them?”