PORTFOLIO 2019-2020

From this work, Chantal Figueroa has been recognized as a country conditions expert on psychiatric disability by the National Qualified Representative Program. As a transnational and interdisciplinary scholar, Figueroa's work demarcates why it is important to focus on the mental health of Central American peoples from their home countries to the United States

During the Summer of 2019, with the support of the Ministry of Education of Guatemala, I trained 250 K-12 teachers on gender violence prevention using the violence framework developed by Dr. Cecilia Menjivar. This training was an effort to center Mental Health through violence prevention strategies.

In this  webinar on critical mental health awareness you will learn:

1. A short history of the colonial roots of the field of psychiatry

2. A critical overview of the values implicit in a western understanding of mental health

3. The four pillars of a Latin American understanding of mental health 

4. A social media strategy to develop critical mental health awareness

This webinar provides an overview of the ways in which oppression can become medicalized and why mental health is a political issue especially for communities of color. 

The question, what is mental health? Has led my exploration of healing and critical consciousness.  As a Guatemalan queer woman, I grew up in Guatemala City during the internal armed conflict and I came to theory to name the violence I had experienced and witnessed, I needed theory to heal. I also needed to understand how the context of war shaped what mental health could be in Guatemala. 

Voces de Mujeres is a women-run radio show of the Universidad de San Carlos, the public University. In this interview, I explained how the systems of mental health work in Guatemala and why it is important to educate for the prevention of gender violence as a first step for mental health. You can find my interview here! It is in Spanish!

During this Keynote, I spoke to Latinx teenagers about the importance of developing critical mental health awareness and how to value our Latinx culture to develop healthy coping mechanisms and resilience. As research shows La Cultura Cura!