This year’s J. Irwin Miller Symposium at the Yale School of Architecture is titled Beyond the Visible: Space, Place, and Power in Mental Health. Throughout the month of September, the symposium will virtually draw together designers and practitioners with the goal of building collective capacity in improving access to mental health services and destigmatizing perceptions of mental health embedded in the built environment. 

In recent months, the global pandemic and momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement have amplified the need to consider the intersection of racial and economic inequality with mental health. Design practitioners have the urgent responsibility to examine and change the systems of institutional violence that inflict racial trauma and reevaluate the existing forms of community building and access to care in our built world.

Beyond the Visible will explore issues of mental health at three scales - the hospital, the home, and the city - gathering interdisciplinary experts to create a shared understanding of how we can intentionally design our built environments for better mental health outcomes.

This inaugural Yale Mental Health Symposium is part of a long-term initiative at Yale, building on the work of the Yale Mental Health Colloquium which took place in 2019.

You can join us for our first event at this zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/96372847655

“Beyond the Visible: Space, Place, and Power in Mental Health” is a digital symposium that runs from September 10-24, 2020. It provides an interactive experience in which Zoom panels, talks, comments, and online discussions will be woven together to form a dynamic discussion between many interest groups.