From Compliance to Clinical Defiance: A Vision for Liberatory Child Mental Healthcare

What if mental health care for children wasn’t about fixing them—but about freeing them?

Too often, the systems that claim to protect—child psychiatry, education, child welfare, juvenile justice—are rooted in punishment, compliance, and control. Even when we don’t directly participate in that harm, as providers we are still entangled in it. We document. We diagnose. We sometimes report.

But what if we told the truth? What if we saw resistance not as pathology, but as survival? What if we stopped asking children to bend to broken systems—and began rebuilding those systems for their liberation, their dignity, and their joy?

In this piece, I reflect on what it means to practice clinical defiance in a carceral system. I share how “mandated supporting” allows us to interrupt harm, how rehumanizing documentation can serve as protection, and how naming the full risks of crisis care can be an act of love. Because love has never been the problem in our work—it’s the thing we’ve been told to leave at the door.

Let’s imagine something better.
Let’s build it—together.