5 Take a Break

Leaky Ceilings and Flooded Hallways: Public Schools Falling Apart

As we write in 2024, both of us university professors and parents of school-aged children, the situation in Ontario public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary schools is dire. “Ontario’s Schools Are Falling Apart,” reads a Toronto Star headline from nearly a decade ago, and conditions have only deteriorated since then (Maharaj and Petch 2016). The neglect of Ontario’s education infrastructure by successive governments has led to what one 2017 study describes as a “rapid and continuous increase of disrepair” (McKenzie 2017, 1). Indeed, most public elementary and secondary schools in the province are well over sixty years old, having been built or else not significantly renovated since the late 1950s and early 1960s to accommodate the population boom of the postwar period. According to the parent-led advocacy group Fix Our Schools, as of 2022, the maintenance and repair backlog for Ontario elementary and secondary schools stands “at a whopping $16.8 billion” (Balintec 2024). Even worse, this backlog does not account for the repairs needed to fix school ventilation and temperature-regulation systems, implement accessibility retrofits, eliminate lead contamination in school drinking water, remove asbestos, or replace the portables that serve as learning spaces for over one hundred thousand students in the province.4 “What we hear and what we see are buildings falling apart,” said then–Elementary Teachers of Toronto President John Smith in 2016 after a student in grade two received a concussion when a bathroom stall door fell off its hinges and pinned the child to the floor (quoted in Parness and Mangione 2016). “Unsafe situations,” he continued, “boilers that don’t work, rooms that are overheated or under-heated, windows that need replacing because the wind is howling through them.” These unsafe learning and working conditions are made visible in a photograph taken at an elementary school in Eastern Ontario (Figure 14). The image—one of hundreds of similar photographs shared by parents, students, and education workers across the province via the Fix Our Schools (2022) campaign website—shows a public elementary school corridor with water dripping down from the ceiling, through the light fixtures, and into a series of large black buckets that line the hallway. These water buckets are, according to the website, a semipermanent fixture in this school hallway, indicating a chronic state of disrepair. What is more, some of the ceiling panels have been removed and replaced with metal grates “so the water can flow freely and prevent further damage to any ceiling tiles” (Fix Our Schools 2022).

In 2023, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)—Canada’s largest school board, servicing a quarter of a million students—announced that their schools needed approximately twenty-four thousand repairs with an estimated price tag of over $4.2 billion. Troublingly, nearly a quarter of the board’s 533 schools are in a state of disrepair deemed “critical” (TDSB 2023). While this example of the ceiling grates and water buckets is one school’s harm-reduction response to deteriorating infrastructure, a statement on the TDSB website discloses a deeper reliance on stopgap maintenance work as part of the board’s formal strategy for staving off something worse: “Our limited funding does not allow us to replace all of these components as we use a big portion of the funding to temporarily repair them to extend their useful service life for another year or two,” the website reads. “This does not mean that the repaired building component is removed from the backlog; it means that its replacement will be postponed” (TDSB 2023). In the meantime, for teachers and students alike, these working and learning conditions are giving rise to increased levels of injury, illness, and unwellness. Indeed, according to the Ontario Ministry of Education, the TDSB has a 32 percent higher absenteeism rate than other school boards in the province (Teotonio 2024).

The Fix Our Schools campaign was started in Toronto in 2014 by a small group of parents with school-aged children who met around a dining room table to discuss how to deal with the poor physical condition of their children’s school. The group was concerned that the deep state of school building disrepair went far beyond aesthetics and was having a major impact on the everyday learning, teaching, and health of students and education workers. While the campaign originally focused on the TDSB, parents soon realized that their school board was not unique in its underfunding of maintenance and repair and that it was the provincial government that could best rectify this situation. The campaign mobilized in person and online to build its base of support across the seventy-two school boards in the province. Campaign members attended school council meetings, school board meetings, and organized meetings with unions representing teachers across the province. Through this work, campaign members educated other parents, teachers, administrators, and union reps about the issue of disrepair and were able to also use these meetings to collect data about how disrepair was affecting different schools across the province. The group was then able to take this information to the minister of education and publicize the data showing the depth of the problem. Their campaign importantly highlights school infrastructure as requiring ongoing resources to maintain, noting that the physical condition of a school also affects absenteeism, test scores, and teacher retention rates and that conducting reactive repairs costs taxpayers more than proactive maintenance. In 2016, the campaign successfully pressured the then-Liberal government to increase the amount spent on repair from $150 million to $1.4 billion per year. When the Conservative government took over in 2018, they maintained that budget of $1.4 billion per year but also added new school construction within this budget line, raising the overall repair backlog from $15 billion in 2016 to $16.8 billion in 2022. The Fix Our Schools campaign continues to push for the government to implement and fund a “standard of good repair” for all of Ontario’s publicly funded schools, urging the government to create transparent metrics that address air quality and ventilation, classroom temperatures, accessibility, environmental efficiency, clean drinking water, asbestos, vermin, and mold. To date, this demand has been ignored by the Conservative government.

In their analysis of the “processes of maintenance and repair that keep modern societies going,” Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007, 5) note how infrastructures are “premised on a certain degree of error or neglect or breakage or failure as a normal condition of their existence.” Vis-à-vis a world of and in disrepair, Graham and Thrift mark the work of repair and maintenance as “vital” and “humble” practices, “the main means by which the constant decay of the world is held off” (2, 1). Key here, however, is to parse out the origins of infrastructural disrepair so as not to smooth over the unevenness of how things (are made to) break. While all infrastructural systems may indeed be prone to decay over time, how and when things break down is never neutral, influenced, for example, by the quality of materials used to build or maintain a structure, the caliber of labor that supports these processes, and the diverse ways such infrastructure may be tended to, cared for, and preserved. While the persistence of decay highlights infrastructure’s “temporal fragility” (Ramakrishan et al. 2021, 676), as Graham and Thrift point out, there is a politics to repair and maintenance that is entangled in broader social, political, economic, and ecological struggles. What is “being maintained and repaired?” Graham and Thrift (2007, 4) ask. “Is it the thing itself, or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?”

In the case of Ontario’s public schools, what is being maintained is a neoliberal social order that largely offers individualized therapeutic repairs that aim to increase the resiliency of teachers and learners to self-responsibilize and to weather breaking conditions. Mental health is, according to School Mental Health Ontario (SMH-ON, n.d.), a “positive state of wellness and flourishing,” and, as reported by the Ontario Ministry of Health (2024), “approximately 1 in 5 children and youth in Ontario has a mental health challenge” that prevents them from reaching such a “positive state of wellness.”5 Schools have been identified as “an ideal place” to “provide students with the knowledge and skills to be aware of, care for, and advocate for their own mental health and well-being” (Ontario Ministry of Health 2024). Since Lecce’s 2019 announcement, school boards are now required to develop and implement a three-year mental health and addictions strategy and a one-year action plan that utilizes a spectrum of services approach focused largely on reducing stigma, self-managing emotions, early intervention, and substance use prevention. School boards must also implement mental health learning modules in grades seven, eight, and ten that “build awareness of the impact of stigma associated with mental illness” as well as address how to “manage stress” and foster “self-care strategies to maintain good mental health and to know where and when to seek help” (Ontario Ministry of Health 2024). SMH-ON (n.d.) resources provided to schools emphasize “everyday mental health practices” in schools, such as extending a warm welcome to students to create a daily sense of belonging. Such practices, they claim, “make economic sense,” yielding “cost savings in other sectors like health and justice,” and lead to better performance on standardized academic tests. Overall, these interventions, despite being implemented at a structural level, largely reinforce mental health as an individual state that can be proactively managed and monitored. For those unable to adequately manage and control their distress, the continuum of care approach offers medical intervention such as psychiatric evaluation and access to counseling or psychotherapy. This focus obscures other possible structural interventions to promote mental wellness, such as approaches grounded in social determinants of health that emphasize poverty reduction, safe and affordable housing, accessible public transportation, school building maintenance and repair, and other forms of public and social infrastructure from which communities can forge strong collective bonds of belonging and support.

Instead, since their election in 2018, the Conservative government has launched a series of brutal, multifaceted, and sustained attacks on public and social infrastructure, and in doing so, it has undermined the well-being of the people most reliant on these infrastructures. This includes a refusal to maintain good relations with education workers, students, and the structures that hold and support them. Far from merely reflecting natural states of wear and disrepair, the leaking, peeling, and crumbling of Ontario’s public school buildings are a form of targeted breakdown. “Public schools are at the center of the manufactured breakdown of the fabric of everyday life,” writes Henry A. Giroux (2018), and “they are under attack not because they are failing, but because they are public.” Indeed, this kind of targeted political, economic, and social sabotage has become a key tool of twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalist governance in Ontario and beyond, where austerity-induced institutional crises produce ruptures that are then exploited by private capital as opportunities to profiteer through restructuring. Kenneth J. Saltman (2007), for example, traces out what he refers to as “smash and grab” privatization, whereby public school infrastructure is deliberately neglected to the point of breakdown only for the private sector to swoop in to save the day.

In Ontario, the stage has long been set for the manufactured breakdown of public education. Back in 1997, for example, under a previous Conservative government, former Ontario Minister of Education John Snobelen said in a leaked video that there was a need to “invent” a “useful crisis” to ensure widespread public support for educational reform (quoted in McConaghy 1997, 332). The system is broken, conjured Snobelen, and needs privatized fixing: “Our challenge is to participate as full partners in this new and exciting evolution of education into a real customer- and client-focused service” (332). Fast-forward to 2020, when the provincial government contracted the firm McKinsey—a prominent private management consultancy known not only for its brutal approach to wage and job cuts but also for its controversial involvement with autocratic governments and US immigration detention centers—to manage and oversee Ontario’s fall 2020 school reopening (Kolhatkar 2018; Markovits 2020). “Crises can be a spur to creative problem solving,” notes the McKinsey report. “Under the pressure of the COVID-19 crisis, school systems can take the chance to rethink some of their traditional ways of doing things” (Bryant et al. 2020, 7). The strategy here is clear enough: Starve, cut, slash, and cap public supports and services until they break, then call on the private sector for a fix. After all, “Ontario is open for business,” as Ford famously pronounced after his election. “Everything,” he promised, “is going out for bid” (quoted in Ontario Newsroom 2018).

As a sense of brokenness belies progressive calls to fund, fix, and care for Ontario’s public schools, we are alert to how broken is deployed by politicians as a means for advocating a shift away from public infrastructure investment and toward privatization. “The school system is broken,” but “we’re going to get it back on track,” said then–Ontario Minister of Education Lisa Thompson in early 2019, on the heels of a multi-billion-dollar divestment from public education by her government (quoted in A. McLaughlin 2019). “That’s the standard technique of privatization,” notes Noam Chomsky (2011), “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” Here, the multivalences of broken push us to further consider the politics of maintenance and repair. We sit with not only how some forms of repair and maintenance are most urgently needed to hold and sustain us as we dream and collectively build a better world but also how repair and maintenance practices can and do work to enact and sustain harm. In the face of targeted breakdown and neoliberal restructuring, we linger in the school corridor shown in Figure 14. The ceiling grates and water buckets do not fix the underlying problem of school infrastructure breakdown, and indeed no cure appears on the horizon. Instead, the school community has adapted to living with chronic leaks in order to limit harm and avoid more severe consequences such as water damage, mold growth, or a potentially debilitating fall on wet floors. In its reliance on this form of maintenance rather than a permanent fix, this is a harm-reduction measure. Plastic basins and ceiling grates, while small and temporary, represent collective efforts to address what is, at least for now, rendered irreparable. However, this stopgap does not signal a triumphant return to wellness: The buckets do not facilitate healthy working and learning conditions, and plastic basins collecting water do not represent the kind of response that promotes collective flourishing or that leads us to something better. Yet, while the buckets don’t deliver us to something better, they might succeed in avoiding, if only for now, something worse. The buckets illuminate the harmful insufficiency of what is before us, and carry us just a little while longer, while we work to better understand the nature of what is broken and the contours of our terrain of struggle for change. Rolling out a mental health curriculum, providing access to mental health professionals in schools, and developing emotional-regulation skills and stress management tools may also stave off some further harms for some students and education workers, but it also maintains a focus on improving individual wellness in the face of structural issues ranging from endemic poverty to poorly maintained school infrastructure. Individual therapy doesn’t adequately provide relief or have all the needed tools to hold the profound distress, despair, alienation, and depression our communities experience as a result of the collective and individual crises we face.

Where we find promise for a different kind of future is in collectively attending to the leaking ceiling as disabled kin. To name the leaking ceiling as disabled kin draws our attention to our interdependent relations, how without adequate care such broken working and learning conditions increase experiences of unwellness and are reflective of a social order that silos, individualizes, and abandons. The broken building disables, maddens, and debilitates, but sustaining our communities extends far beyond the needed $16.8 billion for physical building repair and maintenance. As we will show, making disabled kin points us to the solidarity and expansive collective relations needed to sustain us beyond just attending to isolated repairs. This matters because other forms of harm persist even in well-maintained buildings—harms that deeply affect community wellness and cannot be resolved through individualized approaches to mental health. We further unpack the harms and limitations of approaching mental health within an individualized framework by turning to how the University of Toronto responded to a series of student suicides on campus between 2018 and 2019. We closely examine how mental health care has been wielded by the university and attend to the wreckage in its wake.

The Glass Atrium: Students Falling Through Cracks

Moving away from the leaking corridor of a public elementary school, we now turn our attention to a gleaming architectural gem at one of Canada’s top public research universities. At over half a million square feet in total, the University of Toronto’s (U of T) award-winning $111 million, eight-story Bahen Centre for Information Technology first opened its doors in 2002. In juxtaposition with public school buildings plagued by dilapidated heating and cooling systems, poor ventilation, and leaking ceilings, the Bahen Centre exudes lightness, transparency, life.6 Looking upward from Bahen’s atrium reveals a dramatic circular staircase sheathed in glass that spirals eight stories toward a stunning skylight. “Transparency and light play a large part in [the building’s] design for quality of life,” notes building architect Donald Schmitt (Crailer Communications 2002). “Every office and every lab has a view to the outside world,” Schmitt continues, and during the daytime hours, sunlight spills into the open atrium. At first blush, the contrast between the public school and the Bahen Centre could not be starker. Yet, despite the intended vitality of the Bahen Centre, the building has become synonymous with unwellness and death. Between June 2018 and September 2019, three students died by suicide in Bahen’s atrium, a devastating loss of life that left many students, staff, and faculty grieving and grappling with the conditions that made these suicides possible.

The suicides took place amid what many refer to as a “student mental health crisis” (Lunau 2012; Hawkes 2019; Reid 2013). In 2012, for example, Canadian national magazine Maclean’s declared a “crisis on campus,” calling Canadian university students “a broken generation” (Lunau 2012). Noting a “a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations,” the article subtitle reads: “Why so many of our best and brightest students report feeling hopeless, depressed, even suicidal.” By 2019, across Canada, more than half (52 percent) of postsecondary students reported feeling so depressed that they had difficulty with day-to-day functioning; 2.8 percent of Canadian students reported having attempted suicide within the previous year; and a staggering 69 percent of students reported experiencing overwhelming anxiety (American College Health Association 2019). The Covid-19 pandemic has only further exacerbated the challenges faced by students in the intervening years (Rashid and Genova 2022).

In response to the first two of these suicides, on March 18, 2019, dozens of U of T students silently occupied the second floor of Simcoe Hall, the building housing the university’s president and other senior administrators, with hundreds more students standing outside. The students were reeling, grieving, and angry. Carrying signs with statements like “We Are NOT Numbers,” “You Can’t Ignore Us Forever,” “Our Lives Matter,” and “Silence Can Still Be Heard,” the students spoke with media about long waitlists and limited options in accessing campus mental health services, about deeply engrained forms of institutional ableism and sanism, and about the adoption of the University-Mandated Leave of Absence Policy (UMLAP), a troubling new policy that granted senior university administrators the power to mandate a leave for students deemed “unable to engage in the essential activities required to pursue an education” (University of Toronto 2018, 5). The invisibilization of distress was a key source of anguish voiced by the student activists, who described how UMLAP reinforced a culture of fear and isolation, leaving students who wanted support feeling unable to access it for fear of being placed on leave. Another flashpoint that cut to the heart of the issue was the university’s failure to publicly acknowledge when a student suicide had taken place, instead enforcing a moratorium on using the word suicide (Nasser 2019a). If acknowledging despair and suicide remained taboo, the students argued, then ways of mitigating them would likewise remain hidden. Present at the Bahen Centre in September 2019 when the third suicide took place, Guy Olivier Musafiri comments: “If everything looked normal but someone died in extreme pain, something terribly wrong is going on” (quoted in Aloysius Wong 2023).

Figure 15 shows two photographs taken in the atrium of the Bahen Centre looking upward at the spiraling staircase and skylight. The image on the top is a photograph of the Bahen atrium taken in 2008. The second photo, taken in 2022, shows a similar angle and view of the atrium with the addition of an antisuicide barrier. The previously open hallways facing the atrium were blocked in 2020 by a perforated golden grate that extends vertically from the fourth floor all the way up to the top floor of the building. The addition of the antisuicide barrier was the direct result of the students’ activism and only came after the third of the three deaths. In their call for antisuicide barriers, the student activists acknowledge the imperfection of this harm-reduction repair. Indeed, students have consistently expressed an urgent need to address the social and cultural conditions that create or exacerbate student distress, as well as requested an increase in student-facing services to attend to distress. “This is an institutional problem that starts all the way in the first year of undergraduate programs,” said Meghan Wright, then a graduate student and teaching assistant (quoted in McQuigge 2019). Many have observed, lived through, felt, and described this large urban university’s culture of competitiveness and isolation and related experiences of chronic stress, anxiety, exhaustion, insomnia, loneliness, and depression. In grief and in solidarity, the student activists who mobilized in March 2019 drew attention to the relationship between current university environs and individual and collective states of unwellness. “Thousands of students lack access to a learning environment that allows them to flourish,” write the student authors of Nothing About Us Without Us, a report summarizing student action, testimonies, and demands arising out of the mental health crisis (University of Toronto Students 2019, 3). “It’s literally life or death, what is at stake here,” said fifth-year computer science student Shahin Imtiaz, “The university has turned into a pressure-cooker of intense demands, without the resources to meet the student needs to back it up” (quoted in Mancini and Roumeliotis 2019).

Student Mental Health 2.0©: Neoliberalism’s Fix

In response to the rapid succession of student suicides in 2018–2019, and the resulting outpouring of grief, activism, and media scrutiny, U of T convened a mental health task force to review its services and recommend changes. Drawing on focus group and stakeholder consultations across the university’s three campuses, the Presidential and Provostial Task Force on Student Mental Health: Final Report and Recommendations opens by identifying a clear relationship between student mental distress and broader social, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental conditions (University of Toronto 2019). Despite these important observations, the report largely frames the campus mental health crisis as a set of discrete individual issues—either as a firsthand struggle experienced by students or else as an administrative and pedagogical challenge for faculty, staff, and clinicians. Indeed, even as the report frames mental health as a “shared responsibility” and gestures toward the necessity of building “communities of care,” it nevertheless centers medicalization and individualized treatment—prioritizing therapeutic intervention over more communal or collective forms of care—as the primary response to rising rates of student distress (8). Unsurprisingly, then, the university’s formal response focused on expanding access to personalized mental health services through a comprehensive system redesign: “We need to . . . streamline and simplify the pathways to care,” write U of T President Meric Gertler and Vice President Cheryl Regehr in their letter to the community outlining current and next steps (University of Toronto 2020).

In the fall of 2020, the university launched a new mental health strategy, moving away from a bureaucratic system that had left many students navigating long waitlists for in-person services. Central to this shift was a new online portal that connected students to an updated version of its stepped model of care (University of Toronto 2020). The launch of the website rebranded mental health supports at U of T by mobilizing a flexible range of personalized digital self-diagnostic tools focused on mental health maintenance and just-in-time individualized mental health services. U of T’s mental health strategy is certainly not unique or particular to this institution. Similar, and indeed sometimes identical, mental health strategies are being rolled out across North America. This is because the new stepped care is actually Stepped Care 2.0, a proprietary framework developed by Stepped Care Solutions, Inc. Marketed to be adaptable, customizable, and scalable across institutions, the Stepped Care 2.0 model is being used by universities, colleges, governments, and corporations as a means of improving service delivery efficiency (Vendeville 2022).

Meanwhile, disabled and mad activists, artists, and scholars have long been critical of how twenty-first-century institutional mental health and wellness policies, supports, and services often align with neoliberal ideologies that “pathologize[ ] thoughts and behaviors that deviate from what the market defines as functional, productive, or desirable” through sliding scales of individual responsibility, personal resiliency, and customized recovery, a move that often ends up further exacerbating the unwellness of students (Esposito and Perez 2014, 417). Indeed, in her engagement with college and university students across the United States, Mimi Khúc (2024, 42) notes that students were “very clear about how their university generates and feeds unwellness through a culture of hyperproductivity, overwork, and martyrdom. It bakes racialized ableism into its expectations, into normative ideas of success and failure. . . . It creates an imperative to be the ‘perfect’ student, and mental health structures to help students socialize into these systems, to function well. To pretend well.” Khúc goes as far as to argue that university wellness imperatives make students unwell. She writes: “Universities often say they care. No university would be caught dead without a counseling center, some kind of hotline, a poster that tells you to seek help. . . . What kind of wellness is this striving for? And what of the ways the university itself makes us unwell?” (42). “The university is killing us,” declares Khúc. It does so not only through institutional forms of ableism and sanism that deny, limit, or police disability accommodations and access supports “but also via what it asks us to aspire toward. The university is killing us through wellness” (92). Neoliberal mental health practices seek to transform disabled people into “normative versions of less threatening differences” (D. Mitchell 2014, 5) using “layered governance regimes that . . . strive toward productivity and capacity building through continuously targeting individuals with opportunities to responsibilize” (Fritsch et al. 2022, 17). For the remainder of this section, we identify four key elements that have, in recent years, become endemic to institutional mental wellness responses and that end up contributing to unwellness: first, the shift from categorical to dimensional or spectral continuums of mental health; second, the related personalization and customization of therapeutic mental health supports and services; third, private industry’s extractive commodification of student distress and the rise of a student mental health industry; and finally, the relationship between neoliberal mental health spectrums and carceral forms of care. Taken together, these elements reveal the extent to which institutional terrains of mental health are currently being shaped by broader neoliberal political and economic interests and concerns, maintaining the very conditions that are breaking people while concealing the genealogy of this harm.

Maintaining Disabled Kin

Built as they are upon a rotten foundation of colonial trauma and violence, Ontario’s public schools and universities have—historically and into the contemporary moment—operated eugenically, aligning and at times overlapping with other carceral institutions to segregate, punish, incarcerate, and otherwise eliminate students who do not conform to the colonial norm. Historically, this has included the detention of disabled, mad, and Indigenous children in hospital schools and state-run institutions, as well as racially segregating Asian and Black students. Operating under punitive carceral logics, contemporary public schools and universities across Turtle Island continue to scrutinize the bodyminds of racialized, gender-nonconforming, and disabled students through overt and covert forms of surveillance, control, and containment—processes that are facilitated by school design, architecture, policies, and everyday interactions. Disabled, racialized, and disabled racialized students continue to be forced into spaces of containment, including special education and behavioral classes, group and nursing homes, sheltered workshops, harmful sensory rooms, and (mental) health treatment and prison detention facilities.12 At the same time, educational practices such as streaming and enrichment programs reproduce and exacerbate disparities based on markers of race and class. Framing such forms of violence as evidence of simply a “broken” school system or students and teachers struggling to learn and work under these conditions as individually failing risks invisibilizing the ways settler colonial education systems have always been designed to break (i.e., police, discipline, maim, and make mad) the bodyminds of those it deems as threats to the smooth functioning of the state and racial capitalism more broadly.

By examining the ways mental health discourse and policy are embedded in public education spaces in Ontario, we grapple not only with the colonial and imperial relations that ground contemporary social and material infrastructure but also with the trouble of its abandonment. We don’t want to repair that which was designed to break; we instead need something else entirely. Yet, as we look “for possibilities for a future of infrastructure otherwise,” we recognize that we also need to defer damage immediately by engaging in harm-reduction stopgaps: something better to hold and sustain us for now (Cowen 2020, 481). This chapter posits making disabled kin as a crip practice against carceral logics and neoliberal racial capitalist market-driven economic rationalities (see Introduction). Making disabled kin is a durational strategy of tending to each other and our environs, illuminating the ways our interdependence includes practices of care, access, and abolition across human and more-than-human lifeworlds. In attending to these practices of care, access, and abolition, cultivating disabled kin enables us to build collective connections that can help us move past the insufficiencies of harm reduction as ways of living under broken conditions. As an active practice, making disabled kin helps us dream up, and struggle toward, something better.

Making disabled kin necessitates groundskeeping. This form of crip maintenance work asks us to tend to our foundations, calling for a deeper understanding and acknowledgment of the broader histories and relations of power and resistance that shape current institutions and structures and rationalize targeted forms of institutional abandonment. As Kelly Fritsch, Jeffrey Monaghan, and Emily van der Meulen (2022, 4) note, addressing mental unwellness within the settler colonial Canadian nation-state “requires addressing how ableism and disability oppression have historically functioned and continue to be reproduced through violent and debilitating sites of confinement, practices of containment, and forms of surveillance that criminalize and pathologize disabled populations, especially targeting racialized disabled people labelled with intellectual, developmental, or psychiatric disabilities.” Schools are one such site of institutional confinement, alongside nursing homes, group homes, other long-term and congregate care settings, prisons, jails, and psychiatric facilities. Organized around eugenic practices seeking to eliminate the (social) reproduction of bodyminds deemed threatening to the social whole through medicalizing practices of containment (segregation, criminalization, imprisonment, detention, therapeutic rehabilitation) or eradication (sterilization, immigration and border restrictions, genocide), carceral practices rely on a network of services, service providers, and structures aimed at surveillance and intervention, including education workers, police, courts, social workers, and psychiatrists, or through technologies, from therapeutic behavioral intervention apps to electronic monitoring systems. While the overlapping carceral logics of educational and psychiatric systems have caused significant harm to disabled people, they also serve as points of convergence for disability justice and abolitionist movements seeking to build accessible and noncarceral futures.

The interplay between educational and psychiatric responses to bodily and mental “deviance” predates the formation of the Canadian nation-state and has been fundamental to its establishment and continued existence. This is particularly evident as we turn now to another broken structure: a century-and-a-half-old brick wall (Figure 17) that once enclosed Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health—the backdrop of Lecce’s 2019 press conference that opened this chapter and now a key partner in U of T’s updated mental health strategy. Over the years, this site has been known by many names: the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, the Ontario Hospital for the Insane, and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, among others. Foregrounding more contemporary infrastructures of abandonment, such as the leaky public school hallway, CAMH’s original Howard Building was notoriously dilapidated. Historical records note faulty plumbing, contaminated water, poor ventilation, and a cesspool of excrement beneath its floors (Moran 2000; Voronka 2008). It was against this backdrop of institutional abandonment and decay that the asylum’s mid-nineteenth-century superintendent Joseph Workman introduced a new therapeutic ideology that promoted work as therapy, conscripting inmates into ongoing acts of unpaid labor. Inmates cleaned, maintained, and repaired the institution, beginning with clearing the cesspool in 1853 (Reaume 2000). By 1879, one-third of Ontario’s asylum inmates performed maintenance tasks like laundering, sewing, farming, and building repairs. Mad historian Geoffrey Reaume’s (2000) research details specific projects undertaken by inmates, including laying concrete floors, maintaining and fixing utilities, painting wards, reupholstering furniture, stitching clothes and knitting socks, digging ditches and drains, reconstructing and replacing broken boilers, and building kitchens and even whole new buildings. By 1941, there were inmate-operated repair and woodworking shops, farmlands, orchards, gardens, and a railway stop. While framed as therapeutic, this maintenance work often involved long hours in hazardous conditions. These practices marked a shift from physical coercion to enforced self-discipline under the guise of rehabilitation.

Traces of this unpaid patient labor remain visible at the Queen Street site to this day, most notably in the form of a massive ten-foot-high boundary wall built by patients past (Figure 17). Once serving to physically and symbolically separate those deemed mad or otherwise “degenerate” from the rest of the city—which was subsequently reified as respectable, sane, and civilized—the wall’s boundary work extends beyond marking historical and ongoing carceral practices, by facilitating transhistorical connections. For example, the wall connects us to the eugenic entanglements between nineteenth-century moral therapeutics at the asylum—which relied on the unpaid groundskeeping and other maintenance labor of the inmates—and the economic interests of the institution. Foreshadowing the financialization of twenty-first-century therapeutics explored in the previous section, the moral therapy practiced at the Queen Street site was not centered on the therapeutic interests of the patients who labored but rather privileged the institution that exploited and benefited from their labor. Patients often labored for years, even decades, within the institution, and as Reaume (2000) argues, the therapeutic benefits of work as therapy appear negligible when compared to the operational and financial gains accrued by the institution.

Grounding the making of disabled kin, the wall links us to the stories of confined patients who, despite broken conditions, found ways to endure, resist, and care for one another. In his book Remembrance of Patients Past, Reaume (2000) excavates accounts by and about nineteenth- and twentieth-century mad-identified patients living and laboring at the Queen Street site from state hospital records and inmates’ letters that were confiscated by hospital staff and preserved in institutional medical files. These stories expose the big and small ways inmates refused their exploitation even as they couldn’t refuse the conditions of their labor. Reaume recounts stories of how patients disrupted the institutional economy by creatively repurposing and refusing their labor. Some patients “tried to create their own internal economy” by stealing, trading, and altering institutional materials, using their labor to their own benefit and pleasure (112). Mabel I., for example, a laundry worker who lived forty-eight years in the institution, “was recorded as carrying around a bag full of clothes” that she had altered and designed herself (112). Confined for fifty-eight years, Winston O. utilized his carpentry skills to craft “homemade inventions for his enjoyment and that of others around the institution,” including a violin made from a box, which he played daily (116). He also made a snow shovel and wheelbarrow to help with his maintenance work, a working automobile that he drove around the grounds, and in summer he built “couches in shady nooks as a place to rest” (117). Though they were forced and coerced to maintain the dilapidated institution and its broken-by-design grounds, in this history, we find stories of patients engaging in generative refusals and covert assertions of autonomy, community, and pleasure—patients forging relationships with each other, with everyday objects, and with the land itself. Making disabled kin in this way, and tending to environs and relations, altered the carceral constraints under which these patient-inmates were forced to labor.

Reaume’s history of the Queen Street site offers many examples of how mad and disabled people held and cared for themselves and each other amid breaking conditions. Nurturing kin means tying these histories of resistance to more contemporary forms of activist, artistic, and scholarly interventions seeking to collectivize our states of unwellness within institutional constraints and the terms of its response. For example, in Sajdeep Soomal’s (2020) Architecture After the Asylum—a 2020 multimedia art exhibit that featured work from artists who, through drawings, sculpture, medical records, and video installations, engaged their lived experiences of trauma and injury from living and holding on in broken environs—Soomal offers us a social diagnostic that makes room for nonindividualizing ways of understanding madness and breakdown under broken conditions. Forwarding the notion of “Mad Building Syndrome,” Soomal (2020) “invites us to consider how our environments make us go crazy,” how madness can be evidence of harm: a “product of a broken world” and “a normal bodily reaction to unhealthy living conditions and toxic environments.” “The culprits are everywhere: psychiatric institutions run by settler governments, basement offices turned moldy from corporate negligence, family homes ruined by patriarchy.” This, he notes, “is an indictment of the built environment that we have inherited and its defenders; an indictment of an Enlightened world designed with the objective to contain and control.” Soomal thus draws our attention to logics of containment at the heart of institutions promoting wellness while designed to produce unwellness.

Such an attention to structural forms of unwellness is similarly highlighted in Khúc’s (2024) book Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Drawing on her experiences of unwellness as she navigates the neoliberal university as a Vietnamese, queer, disabled daughter of refugees, and suturing these experiences with those of the students she teaches and encounters, Khúc situates the contemporary student mental health crisis against what she calls “a pedagogy of unwellness” that involves “the recognition that we are all differentially unwell” (5). Throughout the book, Khúc leans hard into spectral thinking. Indeed, with her articulation of sliding states of differential unwellness, she seems to be describing, at first glance, a mental health continuum not unlike the graded, shifting points of well-being and crisis outlined on the U of T portal (Figure 16). Yet, in sharp distinction to neoliberal spectrums of mental health where differential states of unwellness are medicalized, individualized, and indicative of a need for therapeutic (self-)management, Khúc offers us a spectrum of a different order. Khúc’s pedagogy of unwellness reminds us that being unwell in a broken world is not a personal failure but a collective one: “Our unwellness is not our fault,” writes Khúc. Rather, it is tied to life “in a world that differentially abandons us” (5). Neoliberal mental health continuums tie sliding states of individual struggle or illness to equally spectral discourses of personal responsibility, ongoing self-maintenance, and upward mobility. Yet, wellness is neither natural nor apolitical, and, as such, it is not equally available to all. “The world tells us what wellness looks like, marks it as normal,” writes Khúc. “Invisibilized structures holding up bodies and persons—certain bodies, certain persons. Invisibilized structures tearing apart other bodies, other persons” (14). Khúc hails the continuum as a powerful means of tying the particularity of individual experiences of un/wellness to our collective environs and the interdependence of our relations. While people are made to be, and kept, vulnerable, such vulnerabilities, she contends, can also lead us to newfound solidarities: They can “link us,” she writes, “connect us, in a web of death and survival” (14). For Khúc, these ties are, at once, differential—we are not all made to break in the same ways or to the same degree—but also deeply connected. As we identify and trace out the many and graded relationships linking broken structures and broken people, Khúc’s work pushes us to envision new and more collective practices of protecting and preserving (mental) health while also nurturing shared forms of holding and caring for each other in times of targeted abandonment and manufactured crisis, calling for ways in which we might “better identify and tend to our unwellness, together” (5).

Etymologically, the word maintain is derived from the Latin manu tenere, literally to “hold in one’s hand” (OED 2025b). Looking to the broken sites across this chapter, we can glean the multiple valences of this holding, hailing the labor of maintenance as, at once, preservationist (to maintain is “to hold, keep, defend,” to “cause to continue in being”) and supportive (“to sustain,” “to uphold, back up, stand by”). In broken worlds, the work of maintenance can sometimes hold us to harmful historical legacies and insufficient status quos. As we differentially live and work in and under conditions of socioeconomic abandonment, we are held up, put on hold, and held down. We are told that we just need to get a hold of ourselves and hold it together. Yet, there is also a proximity, indeed a relationality, embedded in the labor of maintenance. In this act of holding in one’s hands, we hold that which holds us (see chapter 8). And so, as a collective practice of maintenance, we hold on, hold out for better, and hold fast, just a little while longer. Rife with tensions between care, coercion, and control, the multivalence of maintenance generatively provides insight into the many and differential ways we experience breakdown under conditions of twenty-first-century neoliberal and racial capitalism, including through the targeted abandonment and dismantling of education systems and other social infrastructures and the subsequent mobilization of neoliberal mental health discourses and policies as a response.

We are often confronted with a hyperindividualized call to “hold it together” as a call to self-maintenance and management. What if, rather than calling for individuals to hold it together, we sought to hold it, together? As Khúc (2024, 42) tells it, “Students are tired of being told that they should be well, at all costs. That when they are not, when they break, it is their fault.” Khúc continues, “They want to know that we are all broken, together, and that the world is broken, and that there is life in that brokenness, hope not despite it but because we share it.” The challenge of abolition is how a new order shall begin from current conditions not as a solution but as a process of change that moves us toward noncarceral communities (Ben-Moshe 2022). “The aspiration is to fundamentally change the ways in which we respond to difference and harm,” writes Ben-Moshe (2022, 322). This sentiment is echoed in a poem by Aurora Levins Morales (2013, 165), who invites disabled kin to come as they are: “Come with your triggers, your losses, your scars. When something you hear, something you see, makes your wounds ache and throb, it’s only memory rising, a piece of our history. Bring it into the circle. We will hold it together.”

Holding the Wreckage Together

Forging kin across the various broken sites of this chapter helps to explicitly connect and make collective what is often siloed, individualized, and privatized. We find and forge disabled kin in the collectively oriented creative work of the metal grates that were installed in the ceiling of the leaky public school hallway, allowing the dripping water overhead to flow freely into buckets below. As small and temporary ways of tending to a profoundly broken-down building with no immediate structural cure on the horizon, the water buckets and ceiling grates are not triumphant kinds of repair-as-return, renovations that seek to reproduce conditions of normal functioning or business as usual. The persistence of leakage and the need for buckets lining hallways of elementary schools is not something that promotes collective flourishing and, likewise, is not something we should just learn to live with. Still, they signal a refusal of resignation: These are maintenance acts that defer damage—staving off mold, limiting rot, preventing slippage for the many who pass through the corridors. They expose the outrageous inadequacy of the current state of public schools while also endeavoring to protect those most and multiply affected by this abandonment. When connected to other disabled kin across the province through, for example, the Fix Our Schools campaign, the collective orientation of this harm reduction at one school builds capacity for collective action across many locales.

Unlike the ceiling grates and buckets, the addition of a permanent metal barrier to the physical structure of the Bahen Centre represents a more formal, enduring repair to the existing structure of that building. We thus worry about how the apparent permanency of this repair risks normalizing—and so concealing—the intolerable persistence of conditions leading to student anguish and despair. As the university took down the unsightly drywall barriers that were temporarily erected in the fall of 2019 and installed a newly commissioned architecturally stylized gilded grate as a permanent design feature of the building—as it moved away, in other words, from the temporariness of stopgap maintenance in favor of a polished and permanent fix—it conceded that student suicide is not a one-off or exceptional occurrence at the university but rather an endemic state of contemporary campus life. The subtle, gilded permanency of the Bahen Centre repair—how it integrates almost seamlessly with the architectural aesthetic of the building, almost to disappear altogether—risks the vulgarity of a kind of visually palatable harm-reduction aesthetic. “Suicide prevention needn’t be an eyesore,” as Elissaveta M. Brandon (2021) quips in an appeal for the addition of suicide-prevention barriers at the Vessel structure in New York City, the site of several high-profile deaths by suicide since its opening in 2019. Indeed, she continues, it could even “enhance the overall aesthetic experience” of this popular tourist site. With signs saying “Silence Can Still Be Heard,” “You Can’t Ignore Us Forever,” and “Our Lives Matter,” invisibility was a key source of anguish voiced by the group of U of T students in the spring of 2019. Amid a cultural prohibition on speaking about experiences of mental distress, suicidal ideation, and suicide itself, a repair that normalizes the persistence of student anguish, renders it invisible, and even enhances the aesthetic of the building may well be part of the problem. Antisuicide infrastructure can be read as one part of a constellation of institutional practices of carceral control: Such design elements are almost always accompanied by other and more invasive forms of behavioral controls and surveillance. Indeed, suicide-prevention design is a common marker of carceral sites—from closed-circuit television monitoring inmates in psych wards to suicide-resistant jail cells to reinforced windows in psychiatric care facilities. Insofar as these types of suicide-prevention architectures, practices, and products target a “pathological self”—the person deemed to be at risk of self-harm—for individualized practices of surveillance and compulsory normative rehabilitation, they threaten to divert sustained attention and resources away from confronting collective risk and the work needed to address structural factors in suicidality—austere, colonial, imperial, ableist, and sanist violence, for example.

Yet, even as we critique the Bahen Centre barrier repair for the ways it normalizes and invisibilizes the student mental health crisis, we also cannot turn away from its tangible, material effect: Mitigation techniques like nets and barriers work to save lives. This has borne out in a number of recent studies that have shown that the installation of environmental barriers are successful in dissuading people from engaging in acts of self-harm, particularly young people who are more likely to act on impulse (Toronto Public Health 2018; Sinyor et al. 2017; Merli and Costanza 2024). We are also loathe to turn away from the fact that it is the students themselves who are calling for the erection of these barriers as a means of holding and taking care of each other. “This is not a permanent solution of course,” said student activist Catherine Clarke in an interview with CBC News in the fall of 2019 after the university finally agreed to install the barriers following the third student suicide, “but it would at least discourage actions in the most accessible place on campus” (quoted in Nasser 2019b). “[The student mental health] crisis has a face,” observes then-third-year U of T student activist Hannah Turcotte; “it belongs to students who hold each other on the steps—clinging to each other as they try to fathom the unfathomable. . . . It belongs to the students who won’t come back and the students who are already on the edge” (quoted in Nasser 2019b). With so many students “falling through the cracks,” Clarke and Turcotte refuse the temptation to see the barriers as reparative closure and instead assert they must be seen as a temporary form of stopgap maintenance: a nontriumphant form of upkeep that might hold us and our community for a while and stave off the worst, but only with the hope that we continue to challenge the inhospitable conditions of work, study, and life more generally, while never forgetting the devastating specificity of the lives that have been lost. We learn from our students that the work of breaking, repair, and maintenance on campus is not done, and, as such, we endeavor to ensure the Bahen barrier remains hypervisible, drawing attention to the insufficiency of our shared broken conditions, as well as to the particularities that shape these conditions and affect us differently. After all, as Khúc (2024, 11) reminds us, “we need to see more than just the suicide attempts, more than the breakdowns, the institutionalizations, the medical leaves, the dropping out. We need to see the slow dying that precedes these moments of acute crisis.” And, it follows, we need to search for ways to collectively break these cycles of harm with alternative spaces of care and sustenance.

The leaky school’s ceiling grates form an opening, permitting water to pass so as to prevent sickness, rot, and injury. The antisuicide grates act as a barrier, holding back students from falling. As forms of disabled kin-making involved in pushing back against carceral logics and racial capitalist market-driven economic interests, the grates installed at both broken school sites seek to stave off further damage while dreaming and fighting for something other than constant, unending brokenness and damage. The disruption to the motions of business as usual occasioned by the two different grates must also push us to tend and attend to the nature of what is broken in the first place. A singular focus on merely fixing or maintaining as a smoothing-over of what’s broken in public education in the absence of a sustained, deep, and meaningful engagement with Indigenous and abolitionist calls to break definitively with this neoliberal racial capitalist and settler colonial world and its institutions will ensure the current conditions continue to break all of us, and some of us most acutely. It is important to recognize harm reduction for what it is and not mistake it for freedom. Beyond supporting ongoing struggles for infrastructural resources to repair and maintain schools and broader campaigns demanding state resources to fund affordable and accessible housing, libraries, and public transit or programs to alleviate poverty and hunger, in what other directions might a politics of broken worlds orient students and education workers to hold un/wellness together? To conclude this chapter, we briefly outline a few projects and practices that confront madness, unwellness, and distress in ways that we think could better serve students and education workers.