The Limits of Abolition in the Charity Sector by Dr. Ariel Breaux Torres
Dr. Ariel Breaux Torres is US-licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, abolitionist, and passionate advocate for race equity and racial justice, taking a pro-Black approach to liberation. Prior to relocating to London, Dr. Breaux Torres worked and trained within various correctional and state hospital systems, challenging traditional therapeutic assumptions, centring relationship building, and merging psychology, social justice, and political education. Currently, she is a trustee of Race on the Agenda and Centre for Mental Health, and is a founding member of the Black Mental Health and Wellbeing Alliance, a group who has created and launched the Black Mental Health Manifesto in the UK.
Introduction
Anti-racism in the charity sector has become a widely expressed organisational commitment following the Black Square Summer of 2020. Unsurprisingly, many of these commitments were made without a full understanding of anti-racism and what it requires. Anti-racism requires identifying, challenging and changing systems and structures that uphold white supremacy. With that definition in mind, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see abolition as anti-racism’s logical endpoint.
Abolition calls for dismantling oppressive systems and imagining new ways of being, requiring us to dream outside of what currently exists. Anti-racism and abolition do not merely reform harmful institutions, but eradicate and replace them with structures rooted in justice, care, and community self-determination.
However, in the charity sector, particularly within mental health, abolition is often overlooked in anti-racist endeavours as naive and unrealistic. But make no mistake: there is no anti-racism without abolition! If anti-racism is predicated on challenging and changing systems and structures that uphold white supremacy, we must understand the depths of white supremacy to understand the scale of change that’s needed and why abolition is the path forward.
White supremacy is the socialisation of beliefs about racial superiority that are ingrained within our practices, processes, power structures, laws, privileges, and life experiences, and it also has a symbiotic relationship with other forms of oppression like capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. The roots of white supremacy are deep and far-reaching, having been built upon over centuries, creating the very systems and ways of being that most of us operate within and depend upon. Because of this, merely tinkering at the surface and proposing change that relies on what already exists will do nothing but create an illusion of change, leaving white supremacy intact.
Hence, to achieve the aims of anti-racism, there is a need to go beyond existing solutions, while also deconstructing the systems built from and dependent on white supremacy and other forms of oppression to make room for the solutions we dream up. This is where abolition comes in.
Abolition requires us to access imagination and creativity in order to turn our dreams into our reality. It asks us to take inspiration from children and think without limits, challenging and questioning why things have to remain the way they always have been if that way causes hurt, harm, destruction, and death. White supremacy is dependent on control and is death-bringing. Anti-racism is about freedom and liberation and is life-bringing, understanding that we cannot truly be free while white supremacy reigns.
Many mental health charities adopt what can be described as a one foot in, one foot out approach to anti-racism. On the one hand, they recognise the systemic racism that underpins mental health services, acknowledging the need for change. On the other hand, their very survival depends on the continued existence of the very structures they claim to critique—state institutions, corporate donors, and philanthropic entities that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, as well as tarnished histories rooted in colonial violence.
This contradiction limits charities’ ability to pursue genuine anti-racist work. Instead of challenging the root causes of racial injustice and mental health inequity, they become trapped in cycles of reformist reform, a term influenced by the work of Mariame Kaba, Professor Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Dr. Angela Davis, and others. Reformist reforms refers to incremental changes that do not fundamentally disrupt oppressive systems but instead make them more palatable.
Although this paper focuses on mental health charities in particular, these dilemmas are pervasive throughout the sector as a whole. The structural barriers that maintain charities' dependence on the state limit their ability to adopt a fully anti-racist and abolitionist stance.
Anti-racism Requires Psych Abolition
The history of psychiatry, and by extension psychology, is deeply entrenched with white supremacy and has been, and continues to be, used as a means to control and silence those deemed ‘other’ by labelling them ‘mentally ill’, particularly Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled people. Specifically, psych (psychiatry and psychology) has been used to justify colonialism and the violent subjugation of peoples across the globe, using eugenic pseudoscience to promote beliefs of racial superiority and those deemed inferior as being deserving of enslavement and genocide.
An example of this is the mental health disorder drapetomania, which was coined in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Cartwright to label enslaved Black people’s desire for freedom and escape from slavery as mania and promote forced labour as an adequate treatment. This is not just a relic of the distant past; the current diagnostic manual and medical model use the same eugenic ideologies of deficit and dysfunction which ‘justify’ harmful and violent measures, many of which are devoid of choice and strip people of their dignity and autonomy.
The mad liberation movement has gone to great lengths to shine a light on psychiatry/psychology’s connections to white supremacy and colonialism, as well as highlight the ways in which carcerality is embedded within mental health systems. To honour these efforts, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and name how psychiatry and psychology are extensions of policing, often relying on control, surveillance, and domination rather than centring care, agency, and self-determination.
Take, for example, sectioning or involuntary commitment. It’s challenging to find a difference between that and imprisonment through the criminal legal system, as both are seen as being for the public good, as well as for the good of the person being imprisoned (e.g., rehabilitation via prison or treatment via sectioning). But, both of these examples are the very definition of carcerality, which seeks control using punishment or incapacitation.
Although psychiatry/psychology is often presented as a system that is rooted in care, it cannot be separated from its history of harm, violence, and the carceral logic that is ingrained within mental health systems. So, if mental health charities are seeking to be anti-racist, this requires them to challenge and change the current mental health system, which is a system that upholds white supremacy, meaning that psych abolition is a key element in doing so.
The Charity Sector as a Mechanism of Containment
The modern charity sector operates within a capitalist framework, where funding, legitimacy, and survival are deeply entangled with state and corporate power, creating a containment. Charities operate as intermediaries, filling in the gaps left by an austerity-driven welfare state while ensuring that radical alternatives do not gain traction.
Mental health charities, in particular, are positioned as necessary correctives to a public health system that routinely fails Black and Global Majority communities. But rather than working to dismantle the systemic conditions that produce racialised mental health inequities—criminalisation, economic deprivation, and the psychiatric-industrial complex—many charities focus on treating individual distress within the existing system.
This entanglement with the state also prevents honest critique of the concept of mental illness (or whatever other terminology we see fit to use) as we currently know it, avoiding reckoning with our collective allegiance to, alliance with and perpetuation of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy and naming it as the cause of our current mental health crisis.
Despite biological and medical explanations having less and less empirical support, there is a resistance from mental health charities to take their stances further and acknowledge that perhaps the distress we categorise as mental illness or disorder is in fact a reasonable response to a harmful world. Instead, we teeter around the edges with platitudes that fall short of naming imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy as the culprit and calling for its dismantling, upon which we could build something completely new that doesn’t require the existence of the state and brings us closer to our ancestral conditions of collective and community care.
Philanthropic funding, corporate sponsorships, and government grants all contribute to this containment. Charities that critique state institutions too aggressively risk losing funding, while those that comply or stay within the boundaries of criticism receive financial support to continue their work. This dynamic creates a depoliticised landscape where the most radical demand becomes making services “more inclusive” or “culturally competent” rather than challenging the state’s role in producing harm in the first place.
The Limits of Anti-racism in Mental Health Charities
Funding and the Constraints of Radical Action
Most mental health charities rely on funding from government bodies, corporate donors, or large foundations and trusts. These funders rarely have an interest in dismantling the very structures from which they benefit. Instead, they encourage a palatable, corporate-friendly version of anti-racism—one that focuses on representation, diversity training, and cultural competency rather than structural change (Kaba, 2021). For the ones who vocalise wanting to support systems change, the conditions associated with the funding don’t allow for the time and nuance needed to prove genuine systems change, requiring measurable KPIs and reaching targets to evidence impact.
For example, many advocate for more Black therapists, more cultural awareness in mental health services, and improved access for Black and Global Majority communities. While these are necessary reforms, they do not challenge the fundamental inequities that create racial disparities in mental health outcomes, such as policing, incarceration, economic scarcity, and the medicalisation of distress.
An abolitionist approach, by contrast, would interrogate why Black and Global Majority people are disproportionately subjected to coercive psychiatric interventions, why mental health services are embedded within a carceral logic, and how capitalist exploitation contributes to mental health crises. These conversations, however, threaten the legitimacy of funders and organisations who benefit from the very systems that abolition seeks to dismantle, because without these systems, the existence of the charity sector and philanthropic organisations would be moot.
2. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Deradicalisation
Charities operate within what INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence term the ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ (NPIC)—a system where social justice movements become absorbed into bureaucratic nonprofit structures, which in turn neutralise radical demands. In the mental health charity sector, this means that organisations that may have started with a critical, activist stance often become institutionalised and dependent on funding streams that restrict their ability to advocate for abolition.
Instead of advocating for the defunding of psychiatric institutions that disproportionately harm Black and Global Majority communities and reallocating funding back to communities to support their agency and self-determination, charities may push for “cultural competency” training for police officers or “diversity initiatives” within psychiatric hospitals—reforms that ultimately expand, rather than shrink, the reach of harmful institutions, which can be identified as reformist reforms..
Abolition, in contrast, demands a shift away from psychiatric policing, forced hospitalisation, and punitive approaches to mental health. It requires investment in community-based, non-coercive models of care that are independent from the state. However, most charities are neither structured nor incentivised to pursue these goals, as doing so would threaten their relationships with funders and policymakers.
3. The Charitable Model and the Politics of Dependence
The very structure of charities, where services are provided through philanthropic or state funding rather than as rights, reinforces a politics of dependence rather than self-determination. Mental health charities often position themselves as benevolent actors providing services to those in need, rather than building power within communities to create their own alternatives. On the other hand, those that do centre redistribution of power back to communities struggle to receive or maintain funding to continue their work.
This model reinforces a hierarchy where charities act as intermediaries between marginalised communities and the state, rather than facilitating self-governance and autonomy. As a result, radical, community-led alternatives—such as mutual aid networks, peer support collectives, and grassroots mental health initiatives—struggle to gain traction, as resources are concentrated in institutionalised charities rather than community-led spaces.
It also forces those that began as community-led to weigh up whether they must sacrifice their radical origins and engage with the state and other institutions to ensure survival or to have a seat at the table when decisions are being made about their communities.
Examples of Charities and Organisations Defying the Norm
Despite these limitations, some organisations have resisted the constraints of the traditional charity model and taken a more radical approach to mental health and racial justice.
Healing Justice London
Healing Justice London challenges the traditional model by centring abolitionist principles in its work. Instead of advocating for minor reforms within existing mental health institutions, it focuses on community-led healing, reparations, and self-determined mental health care. It also cultivates spaces to dream up alternatives to our current systems and structures, such as its Psych Abolition and Mad Liberation collection.
2. Black Thrive
While Black Thrive partners with institutions, it maintains a strong focus on systemic change, advocating for shifts in power and decision-making rather than just service provision.
3. Platfform
Platfform is a UK-based mental health and social change charity that advocates for a trauma-informed and strength-based approach to mental health. Their manifesto for change acknowledges that “the systems need to be redesigned to take into account the things that are really affecting our collective mental health: poverty, adversity, injustice, and trauma.”
4. National Survivor User Network (NSUN)
NSUN is a user-led membership organisation that amplifies the voices and work of its membership, which consists of people with lived experience of mental ill health, distress, and trauma. Power and resource distribution are central to their work, as is using their voice to champion political education and critical approaches to mental health, like their recent workshop on Madness, Queerness, & The State: The History of LGBTQ Mental Health in the UK.
5. Towards an Abolitionist Future for Mental Health
Mental health charities are caught in an inherent conflict: their existence depends on the continued survival of the very systems that produce harm. As a result, they are often limited to reformist approaches that make oppressive institutions more palatable rather than dismantling them entirely.
A truly abolitionist approach to mental health would require dismantling the conditions that make charity necessary in the first place. Abolition requires more than representation within existing structures—it demands a complete reimagining of mental health care that is independent from state control, punitive interventions, and capitalist exploitation. While many charities are structurally unable to adopt this vision, there are growing movements, such as the Campaign for Psych Abolition, pushing towards truly transformative alternatives for us to learn from. Now is the time to critically reflect on how we want to move forward and if we want our future to be more of the same or something radically different.
We must challenge notions that abolition is idealistic and naïve, and remember that abolition is happening around us every day. I highly recommend Marime Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, a blueprint for abolitionist organising. To free us, we must work together to dream up a liberated future in which there is no need for the state, a future where that doesn’t rely on punitive punishment but instead on genuine collective care, a future where everyone can thrive.
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