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This paper shares findings from a qualitative study on university student mental health and illness that included digitally recorded interviews with university student services and programs professionals and staff at a Canadian university. Transcripts were thematically coded and analyzed using a disability studies informed interpretive sociological approach. Four key themes emerged: dwelling with disclosure, being open to the 'nothing but', understanding oneself as 'not a counselor', and coming to terms with the reality that under neoliberalism 'we all fall' Two key insights also emerged from the analysis: 1) Access to university-based programs and services is shaped by assumptions about productivity and reputation; 2) Psychiatric knowledge and expertise influences and informs how university student services staff understand and enact their roles within the university system. This paper considers how university-wide productivity-oriented psy-knowledge and practices organize and authorize what one participant described as a 'hidden curriculum' of academic success. This hidden curriculum manifests in the form of a referral-based resiliency (govern)mentality in university student service provision. It closes with a reflection on the transformative potential of adopting a "critically maladaptive" (McLaren, 2010, p. 504) approach that is attentive to alterity in university-based student services professional perspectives which appears in the form of a thoughtful "but…".

Guided by insights from interpretive sociology, Mad Studies, and Disability Studies, this paper explores the role of universities in a psycho-social politics of resilience. I examine how the concept of resilience is used to rationalize the removal of the perspectives of university students with lived experience of disability and madness. Focusing on the University of Toronto, Canada, as a case, I trace the systematic exclusion, silencing, and erasure of the perspectives of people with lived experience within the University to the University's inception as a colonialist project. The analysis is supported by a theorization of resilience and a brief genealogical analysis of the University of Toronto's history as "Temporary Asylum for Female Lunatics" (or "University Asylum") from 1856–1869. This paper illustrates the integral role that the concept of resilience plays in the social order of the University, and in the exploitation, oppression, and forcible displacement of mad-identified people by the University. Although the University Asylum building is now demolished, the colonial project that leveled it lingers on in resilience-based, success-oriented, university disability programs and initiatives.

This article examines the governance of student life in university settings through an examination of discourses of wellness and resilience in the university sector, and in particular at the University of Toronto. Resilience, it is argued, is strategically deployed in ways that enjoin students to think positively about their experiences of university life so as to avert any experience of distress or disability. This is undertaken with the aim of producing a healthy and 'well' student body, but does little to address inequalities amongst students, nor how such inequalities might be important in addressing student distress. Focusing on an analysis of the University of Toronto Student Life Programs and Services programs and publications, and in particular pamphlets and newsletters, such as Health & Wellness: Helping Students Make the Most of the University Experience (2009), it seeks to understand the role of resilience in the production of student life and the governance of the university experience. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the possibilities and limits of a new vocabulary of resilience (Seligman, 2009), which posits an expectation of suffering as a resource which can be drawn on in times of stress, and the "positive" disciplinary regimes this vocabulary enforces. This examination is carried out with the overall aim of disrupting unexamined relations to representations of institutional sites and services as resources, and to demonstrate how such representations rely on and reproduce notions of difference, disability and distress as difficulties to be both renounced and exploited. It is also to provoke greater recognition within social justice studies of how university health services texts such as the Health & Wellness pamphlet and newsletters directed at students strategically deploy notions of resilience to govern interpretations of resistance as illness, rather than emancipatory action.

By mapping tacit and contested assumptions about adversity, works in this issue shift understandings of survival and resilience from individual assets to spaces of solidarity, collective action, culture-building and community identity. Spanning diverse institutional, geographic, community and subjective sites, authors chart new terrains for knowing, representing and experiencing survivals, ruptures and resiliencies.

This article explores whether isolation and control observed during COVID-19 are a pandemic effect or a perpetual socio-spatial feature of long-term care (LTC) culture. We use narrative analysis to foreground the experiences of two women with dementia trying to leave LTC: one before and the other during the pandemic. Using the lens of affective citizenship, we argue that the spatial experiences of confinement for people living in LTC are routinely overlooked in popular discourse. We reflect upon how the segregation of older people with dementia in LTC contributes to discriminatory practices beyond these institutions and advocate for a policy of deinstitutionalization.

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Directly funded home care provides funds to individuals to arrange their own services. We ask, what is unique about being a directly funded home care worker? Our qualitative case study in Manitoba, Canada, included an online survey of 95 directly funded workers and interviews with 13 key informants, 24 clients and/or family managers, and 23 workers. Framed by feminist and disability care theories, we found 'social task shifting', that is: work that keeps households running and supports socialising; front-line worker involvement in care administration; and blurred relationships. Some directly funded workers are empowered by social task shifting, though the expectations can feel limitless.

An exceptional showcase of interdisciplinary research, Critical Inquiries for Social Justice in Mental Health presents various critical theories, methodologies, and methods for transforming mental health research and fostering socially-just mental health practices. Marina Morrow and Lorraine Halinka Malcoe have assembled an array of international scholars, activists, and practitioners whose work exposes and disrupts the dominant neoliberal and individualist practices found in contemporary mental research, policy, and practice. The contributors employ a variety of methodologies including intersectional, decolonizing, indigenous, feminist, post-structural, transgender, queer, and critical realist approaches in order to interrogate the manifestation of power relations in mental health systems and its impact on people with mental distress. Additionally, the contributors enable the reader to reimagine systems and supports designed from the bottom up, in which the people most affected have decision-making authority over their formations. Critical Inquiries for Social Justice in Mental Health demonstrates why and how theory matters for knowledge production, policy, and practice in mental health, and it creates new imaginings of decolonized and democratized mental health systems, of abundant community-centred supports, and of a world where human differences are affirmed