Who We Are
We are mental health workers, clinicians, psychiatrists, current and prior users of mental health services, advocates, artists, and survivors of trauma and adversity, who are interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.
We believe that change happens through dynamic collaboration between clinicians in the field and advocates on the front lines dedicated to shifting policy and practice while building and uplifting safe alternatives. We understand that it is time for a new paradigm in mental health: one that does not deny anyone self-determination and healing, that accounts for the complexity of personal, social, and collective traumas, that opens up our narrow definition of "normal" for the full range of human experience, and allows us to look beyond medicalized and disease-centered thinking to offer regenerative, holistic, and transformative practices.
Transformative Mental Health
IDHA is advancing a new paradigm of Transformative Mental Health. This is the practice of personal and collective healing rooted in:
Systemic Change
An understanding that healing requires a critical consciousness of multiple intersecting systems of oppression and the impact our society has on our bodies, minds, and communities.
Experiential
Knowledge
A proliferation of our lived and embodied experiences as the most powerful form of knowledge creation. Best practices and trainings are created by or in direct collaboration with people who are labeled with mental health issues and those most impacted by trauma and harmful systems.
Holistic Care
Uplifting multiple voices and frameworks bring us closer to a full understanding of healing. Healing is a creative process. Health is far more than the absence of suffering. Healing must address the whole person (mind, body, and spirit) as well as the broader context in which the person lives. Holistic healing focuses on uncovering the multiple roots of pain, preventing suffering as opposed to treating symptoms, and honoring the the vast range of human experience.
Transformative Mental Health understands human suffering, mental difference, and the full range of emotion, as a catalyst for generative change, rather than a pathology. Transformative Mental Health is an evolving process, not a destination.
Our History
Founding
IDHA was founded in April 2016 as a collaboration between Jazmine Russell, an activist, educator, trauma survivor, and peer specialist, and Dr. Peter Stastny, a psychiatrist with deep roots in the peer-movement. The pair met on a fateful evening when Jazmine gave a presentation at the NYC chapter of the Icarus Project on “Psychiatric Advance Directives: Rallying Your Community In Times of Crisis.” The two bonded over their desire to bring voices of lived experience to the frontlines of mental health education.
Jazmine had recently exited her role doing Home-Based Crisis Intervention in Brooklyn, disillusioned by the ways in which public mental health services function as a band-aid for the deeply-rooted trauma, systemic oppression, and institutional abuse that prevents survivors and practitioners from working together towards healing and transformation. Peter had decades of experience re-designing crisis responses in New York State and advocating for alternative services led by psychiatric survivors. The two joined forces based on their shared mission to rally networks together and shed light on the transformative potential of these alternative crisis responses.
Together with IDHA’s founding members, Jazmine and Peter launched IDHA with the vision to create a transformative mental health training institute that uplifted transformative modalities, centered lived experience, and became a hub for leaders and change-makers to shift the mental health paradigm.
Timeline
IDHA's founding
2016
IDHA is founded by Jazmine Russell, Peter Stastny, and a small community of activists, clinicians, and other advocates
2017
IDHA offers its first in-person training series, Re-thinking Crisis in New York City
2018
IDHA offers its largest in-person training series, Experience Transforms Practice, over the course of nine months in New York City
2019
IDHA initiates an organizational development process to define its structure in alignment with its principles and values
2020
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, IDHA transitions its trainings to virtual, reaching hundreds of people across the country and world
2021
Core curriculum and scaling
IDHA begins to develop its core Transformative Mental Health curriculum, to be adapted internationally