Jan DeFehr

Title: Associate Professor
Phone: 204.988.7565
Email: jn.defehr@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

Jan has worked as a publicly funded social worker/counsellor for twenty years in contexts such as “youth corrections,” community health centre crisis and trauma programs, hospital, and university student counselling services. She is an associate of the Taos Institute and has published and presented with colleagues at the Kanankil Institute (Mérida, México) since 2004. Publication of Jan’s latest book, A Critical Mental Health Primer: Towards Informed Choice in Social Services, Education, and Healthcare (Canadian Scholars’ Press) is expected in February 2025.

Jan’s teaching and research forges generative connections between professional ethics standards, decolonial liberation movements, and critical scholarship in the field of mental health. Promoting informed consent/informed choice practices and policies, her work aims to build public access to the extensive body of interdisciplinary peer-reviewed critical mental health scholarship that has been produced by critical patients/ex-patients, academics, and professionals. A member of the UW education faculty since 2015, Jan holds an MSW (clinical stream) from the University of Manitoba and a PhD in Social and Behavioural Sciences from Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

Teaching Areas:

Critical mental health/Mad studies; procedural fairness & transparency in the mental health system; anti-oppressive practices; psychiatric drugs; critical & conventional trauma studies; suicide & crisis intervention; weight-neutral/weight-inclusive practices; dialogic social inquiry; social constructionist conceptual resources; colonial state violence; care-based, peer-led community-building; transformative justice; non-pathologizing approaches to helping that centre student wisdom and agency.

Courses:

Critical Analysis of Mental Health Practices in Schools (EDUC-4502)

Crisis & Trauma in Learning Environments (EDUC-5432 )

Rethinking Mental Health in Schools (EDUC-5001)

Group Guidance and Counselling in School Settings (EDUC-5424)

Research Interests:

Dialogic, community-driven action research; critical mental health knowledge mobilization; informed choice practice & policy development