About the Series

This event is part of an ongoing talk series inspired by IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. It features curriculum faculty and collaborators and dives into timely topics that intersect with our transformative mental health lens.

A first panel explored how to bridge the gap between the reality of mental health services and a world in which people’s autonomy and self-determination are truly centered; second grounded us in the notion that mental health is political, discussing the role providers can play in co-creating a more liberatory and equitable future with their clients; and a third focused on the importance of experimentation and radical imagination in mental health. Learn more about the curriculum and enroll here.

About the Event

Amid rising authoritarianism and the ongoing erosion of human rights in the U.S. and globally, mad and disabled community members face increasing risks to their personal freedoms. The right to self-determined care is often sacrificed to political agendas that favor control over compassion, alongside biomedical models of mental health that exclude and abuse those experiencing distress and trauma. In these challenging times, it is vital for care workers, activists, and organizers to look beyond our borders to learn from – and with – global movements that have long advocated for the right of people with psychosocial disabilities to live in the community and shape their own care. Cross-border solidarity is crucial in challenging the growing influence of punitive, carceral mental health care models.

Join IDHA on Sunday, February 16, to hear from a panel of activists, clinicians, and advocates committed to shifting the global mental health paradigm. Panelists will share their insights on the most pressing challenges we face in the current landscape and the strategies necessary to drive systemic and lasting change. Drawing from local examples of transformative mental health in action, the conversation will center on the role of relationships, community support, and interdependence in reimagining care. Through an exchange of diverse stories and perspectives, this event seeks to highlight the power of global solidarity in advancing mental health practices that reject coercion and institutionalization in favor of prioritizing rights, dignity, autonomy, and choice.

This event is open to mental health workers and clinicians, researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates – anyone who is interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

Register in advance via Neon to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

About the Series

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two and a half years since, IDHA’s six panels have reached more than 14,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members.

We have thus far explored: the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response; the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion of marginalized communities; concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice; how to build community-based healing alternatives; how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability; the ways in which institutionalization operates as a tool of social control; and how the mental health industrial complex pathologizes acts of resistance.

About the Event

The mental health and legal systems are intimately intertwined. For example, mental health practitioners and others are guided by legal mandates and/or workplace policies that may require them to report threats of harm to state actors. These mandates go by different names (e.g. mandated reporting, duty to warn, and duty to protect), and vary greatly by state. There is often a great deal of confusion about what these terms mean and what these policies look like in practice; as a result, many mandated reporters are compelled to overreport anything they think may be violence, harm, or abuse. The consequences are dire: these legal mandates erode the fundamental rights of those receiving services, decrease connection and trust, and are proven to make those seeking help less safe by forcing them into systems that aren’t designed to help them. People with marginalized identities are disproportionately impacted by these practices, particularly Black and Indigenous people of color, queer and trans folks, and disabled community members.

On Tuesday, November 12, 2024, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Beyond Mandated Reporting. This eighth installment will delve into the nuances of how legal mandates operate in mental health care, and how “protective measures” can function to maintain entanglement with carceral systems. We will explore the complex terrain that care practitioners navigate, caught between ethical obligations and legal mandates, and the challenges to provide compassionate and non-coercive care while being deployed as an agent of the state. A panel of practitioners, individuals with lived experience, activists, and policy experts will offer diverse perspectives on how to navigate and resist the pressures of legal mandates in mental health, and how to practice in ways that prioritize autonomy, healing, and liberation. The discussion will focus on concrete tools and actionable approaches that center autonomy and are rooted in grassroots policy analysis.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Update as of 11/4: Nikita Rahman was originally listed as a panelist for this event, and is unfortunately no longer able to join us for this conversation.

Moderator

About the Event

Join IDHA on Saturday, September 21 for an in-person screening and discussion about the short film Smile4Kime at Woodbine NYC in Ridgewood, New York City. Smile4Kime is an experimental autoethnographic film that tells the story of how two friends transcend time, space, and even death to find hope and resilience through their struggles with mental health. The film explores the institutional barriers Black women face when seeking support, and what it is like to navigate harmful institutions that are positioned to help. It is also a story about friendship, chosen family, and how we let others in.

After screening the film, we will be joined by director Elena Guzman and a panel of survivors, care workers, and community members for a panel conversation about the wisdom of lived experience in mental health and how to care for those navigating suicide. The event will also feature ample opportunities for somatic grounding, honoring individual and collective grief, and resource sharing. Light refreshments and snacks will be provided.

This event is open to mental health workers and clinicians, researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates – anyone who is interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

For those not based in the NY area, Smile4Kime is available to view for free on YouTube! We encourage you to watch at your leisure, and to engage with the resources available on the film’s website, which include a syllabus, zine, lesson plan, and discussion questions.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Event Details

DONATIONS

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can compensate our facilitators and cover other essential organizing costs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

ACCESS

Woodbine is a wheelchair accessible space. The film will be equipped with English subtitles, with an audio description version available upon request. We ask that attendees refrain from wearing perfumes or colognes in the space. Please submit any questions regarding accessibility to contact@idha-nyc.org. 

COVID PROTOCOL

The COVID pandemic is not over and many members of our community are disabled and/or immunocompromised. IDHA takes COVID safety extremely seriously and has put in place the following precautions for this event. Masks will be required during the duration of the event. We ask that you please test for COVID before attending, and do not attend if your test is positive or you are feeling sick. COVID tests, KN95 face masks, and hand sanitizer will be available on site. We request that everyone be considerate of the fact that some of us have more vulnerabilities than others, and operate from the understanding that the choices we make as individuals impact the wider collective.

Panelists

About the Series

This event is part of an ongoing talk series inspired by IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. It features members of our teaching faculty team and dives into timely topics that intersect with our transformative mental health lens. A first panel explored how to bridge the gap between the reality of mental health services and a world in which people’s autonomy and self-determination are truly centered, and a second grounded us in the notion that mental health is political, discussing the role providers can play in co-creating a more liberatory and equitable future with their clients. Learn more about the curriculum and enroll here.

About the Event

Many mental health providers work within systems that don’t fully align with their values, which can lead to disillusionment, moral injury, and burnout. Even though this is a common experience, providers rarely have the opportunity to share these experiences with one another, and to collectively practice bridging the gap between personal values and professional ethics. Further, due to the dominance of Western approaches to mental health, there is often little room for experimentation.

Abolition teaches us about the value of radical hope and imagination; in the words of Mariame Kaba, we must try “a million different little experiments” on the journey to build a more liberated future. Transforming mental health practice requires risk and invites failure – all of which teaches us invaluable lessons to carry us forward. Within this moment of political upheaval and collapse, it is paramount that care workers continue to engage in experiments of transformative mental health, large and small. Even in repressive environments contained by rules and restriction, providers can create places of refuge – moving away from oppressive and pathologizing paradigms, towards liberatory and life-affirming care. All of these smaller experiments contribute to the larger sea change of transformative mental health.

Join IDHA on Monday, August 19 to hear from a panel of community members who are creating spaces of refuge and transformation in and outside the mental health system. Panelists will share their experiments in transformative mental health, and how they have been cultivated over time. The conversation will approach experimentation through a multiplicity of roles and relationships to mental health including provider, activist, educator, and lived experience. This event seeks to remind us about the importance of radical imagination, and how we can all create spaces of hope and possibility within our current work.

This event is open to mental health workers and clinicians, researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates – anyone who is interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

About the Event

Within the mental health industrial complex (MHIC), the education and training required to be considered a “good therapist” is gate-kept by “expert therapists” in the field – who are largely male, and almost exclusively white. The MHIC appropriates and repackages knowledge off the backs of marginalized communities, particularly BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and people with lived experience. Conceptions of “professionalism” are rooted in systems of oppression (e.g. colonialism, white supremacy, ableism, cis-hetero-patriarchy), and often require mental health providers to betray themselves, their communities, and those they seek to support. This manifests, for example, in therapists feeling they can’t speak out about decolonial liberation struggles – including in Palestine. An intersectional approach is critical for practitioners to balance their identities as therapists, individuals, and community members, and to practice in ways that are rooted in an ethics of care.

We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30 for a 2-hour virtual workshop that will examine the structures that shape what constitutes a “good therapist,” deconstruct what “professionalism” is and looks like, and offer strategies for care providers to creatively redefine these concepts. Facilitators will open by defining who is considered an “expert” within the MHIC, and debunking common myths of “professionalism.” Participants will have the opportunity to unpack these ideas in small groups, culminating in a discussion about ethical considerations to carry forward in this work. This event will share key context and tools for those interested in decolonizing and unsettling mental health practice, and addressing other challenges inherent to care work.

This event is particularly geared towards mental health “professionals,” including but not limited to counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, and peers. People with lived experience, activists, artists, researchers, and other community members are also integral in our efforts to deconstruct professionalism, and encouraged to participate.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

About the Series

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two and a half years since, IDHA’s six panels have reached more than 11,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members.

We have thus far explored: the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response; the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion of marginalized communities; concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice; how to build community-based healing alternatives; how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability; and how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control, manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally.

About the Event

For as long as there has been repression, there has been resistance. A longstanding strategy for undermining this resistance has been to pathologize those who challenge the capitalist, colonial status quo. This practice has deep roots in the history of the mental health field, from labeling those who sought to escape slavery with the psychiatric disorder of drapetomania, to labeling Indigenous peoples as “primitive” “savages” who must be mentally deficient to resist “civilization,” to diagnosing Black men who participated in civil rights demonstrations with schizophrenia in a phenomenon known as the protest psychosis. Today, amid multiple ongoing genocides and widespread organizing against colonial violence, activists are commonly threatened with institutionalization as a result of their protest activities – including those fighting for a free Palestine. The pathologizing of resistance is part of a global pattern of discrediting, undermining, and incarcerating those who dare to speak out against injustice.

On Thursday, April 25, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: The Pathologizing of Resistance. This seventh installment will explore how the mental health industrial complex has pathologized acts of resistance throughout history, and how this plays out in the present day. A panel of activists, survivors, researchers, and providers will discuss the ways in which the fields of psychology and psychiatry have been wielded as a tool of domination by oppressive actors – and the impacts in current policy, research, and service delivery contexts. Grounded in lessons from decolonial liberation struggles from Turtle Island to Palestine and beyond, we will share strategies for care workers, healers, and other advocates seeking to push back on these carceral dynamics. We will also hold space for the wisdom of madness in this time of mass crisis and grief.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

About the Series

This event is part of an ongoing talk series inspired by IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. It features members of our teaching faculty team and dives into timely topics that intersect with our transformative mental health lens. A first panel in September 2023 explored how to bridge the gap between the reality of mental health services and a world in which people’s autonomy and self-determination are truly centered. Learn more about the curriculum and enroll here.

About the Event

In this time of prolonged crisis and violence, many mental health providers are experiencing challenges in providing meaningful care to those they seek to support, as well as sustaining their own practice. Dominant mental health approaches encourage disconnection from body, mind, spirit, and our world, which greatly hinders a provider’s ability to show up authentically and effectively. Many people enter the field with a desire to help, but aren't given tools to navigate the trauma of systemic oppression and violence – which often leads to more harm. 

IDHA’s transformative mental health lens provides a roadmap to help meet this moment. It recognizes the inherent connections between our personal and collective transformation, uplifting care modalities that foster connection and name the root causes of trauma and distress. Transformative mental health situates providers within a wider ecosystem of change and liberation, calling upon them to join wider movements for equity and justice.

Join IDHA on Tuesday, February 20 to hear from a panel of activists, survivors, and providers about how they practice a transformative approach to mental health that honors our unique histories and inherent interconnectedness. Centering a multiplicity of roles and relationships to mental health, panelists will share how they have fostered self-awareness and sustainability by analyzing power in their lives and work. This event intends to ground us in the notion that mental health is political, and the role providers can play in co-creating a more liberatory and equitable future with their clients. 

This event is open to mental health workers and clinicians, researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates – anyone who is interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

Join the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), and USA Palestine Mental Health Network (USA PMHN) on Monday, December 11 for a virtual panel conversation with mental health providers creating opportunities for solidarity with Palestinian liberation through their roles. 

Beyond clinical approaches for supporting clients directly impacted by the ongoing genocide and addressing historical, collective, and racialized trauma, we will invite panelists to share their own strategies and skills for politicizing the therapeutic relationship in the context of this repressive moment. Further inquiries into knowledge and praxis will aim to connect the dots between psychoeducation and political education, mental health and collective care, and Palestinian and global liberation.

This event is particularly geared towards mental health workers, clinicians, counselors, and students interested in deepening solidarity with Palestinian freedom struggles. Researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates are also welcome to join us.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

NAASW, IDHA, and USA PMHN are small organizations that strive to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. This event is by tiered suggested donation to cover the cost of ASL interpretation and panelist honoraria, though no one will be turned away due to a lack of funds. Any further proceeds generated from the event will be donated to organizations that support Palestinian liberation efforts.

Access

ASL interpretation and automated captioning will be provided. Recording to be announced.

If you have any questions about access or otherwise, please email contact@idha-nyc.org or abolitionistsw@gmail.com.  

Panelists

Vivian AbouAllol, Ms.Ed, LMHC, LCPC (she/her) is a  Palestinian American Psychotherapist practices in Florida and Illinois.  She received her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from Northern Illinois University and currently is working on her Doctoral degree. Vivian is on the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network Steering Committee. She is a qualified supervisor providing supervision in Florida state. She has extensive training in Trauma, Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), and Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). Vivian has widespread experience with PTSD, anxiety, depression, grief, adjustment issues and Substance abuse. She helped individuals and families of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Vivian currently works in her private practice and is a provider for a Group practice.

Gina Ali (they/she) is a queer North African & Muslim therapist living on the occupied territory of Tongva land (also known as Los Angeles, California). They are currently a Ph.D. candidate developing research within the field of decolonial psychology. Gina has spent many years divesting from western individualistic mental health models and moving towards a framework that centers healing within relationships. Through their educational content on social media, Gina focuses on how processing collective trauma requires a shift from “me” to we to truly identify the root of what pains us. Their therapeutic practice has become a way to create room for marginalized people to imagine life past survival, despite the dominant narrative of exile and erasure under oppressive systems. Within this space, Gina invites the transformative potential of embracing neurodivergence, tapping into ancestral wisdom, and contributing to the creation of a world rooted in community care. 

Roula Hajjar (she/her) is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, where she works with adults, couples and groups across the life course. She received her MSW from Silberman School of Social Work in 2022. Prior to beginning her MSW, Roula worked in policy. She received and B.A. from the American University of Beirut in Political Studies and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Public Policy. Having been trained in the social work discipline, Roula endeavors to bring in an awareness to the material realities of the individuals she works with, recognizing structural violence and systematic oppression in the contextualization of their pain. Roula is a first-generation Arab immigrant from Lebanon. She is a native Arabic and English speaker.

Melody Li, LMFT (they/佢) is the founder of Inclusive Therapists: a mental health directory, resource hub & community centering marginalized communities. They also founded Mental Health Liberation, a non-profit bridging Black, Indigenous and People of Color with free, quality therapy, and empowering Students & Clinicians of Color. Their activism focuses on decolonizing mental health care and dismantling the industrial complex. The colony-born migrant and settler on Turtle Island advocates for Landback, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Black Liberation as priority.

Christine Schmidt, LCSW, CGP (she/her) is a clinical social worker and group psychotherapist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York. She is on the Steering Committee of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, the Co-President of Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and the co-founder of Racial Literacy Groups collective. Christine has published about the psychological dynamics of racism with particular focus on the impact of whiteness.

Lara Sheehi, PsyD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology and founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022) which won the Middle East Monitor's 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is currently under contract with Pluto Press for her new book project, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures.

Moderator

Brianna Suslovic is an abolitionist social worker and doctoral student based in Chicago on unceded Potawatomi land. She is affiliated with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.

About the Event

In April 2023, IDHA convened the sixth installment of our ongoing Decarcerating Care series, Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures. This panel explored how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities, manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally.

In a follow-up community event on Thursday, December 7, Decarcerating Care panelists Kelechi Ubozoh and Rob Wipond will delve deeper into how we define and understand “political” uses of psychiatric detention and commitment powers in a contemporary North American context. Speaking from lived experience, Kelechi will share personal perspectives on psychiatric force. Grounded in ongoing journalistic work at the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, and community issues, Rob will frame various ways of understanding “political” uses of force, historically and in the present day.

The presenters will discuss both self-evident and more “gray-area” examples of politicized uses of psychiatric powers, culminating in a discussion of current changes to mental health laws in California. The event will conclude with a group discussion about different ways to understand political uses of psychiatric powers, with the goal of developing shared strategies to better convey this idea to the general public when most mainstream messaging tends to present these powers as individually-targeted, non-political, and healing.

This event is open to a multi-stakeholder audience, including people with lived experience, mental health providers of all kinds, activists, writers, artists, researchers, and other advocates.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

About the Event

As we witness ongoing colonial violence and genocide, it is more important than ever to increase our capacity for an ethics and practice of care rooted in consent and accountability. Many people have learned to shift their gaze or look away when others are experiencing trauma or oppression, with dire consequences. Holding space and providing support are sacred practices, and it’s critical that we are equipped with skills and practices that support liberation, rather than perpetuate harm. By building our toolkits, the practices of witnessing and care can become more sustainable.

Licensed therapist and observer-disruptor Oumou Sylla created Radical Mental Health First Aide (RMHFA) to radically reimagine how care is accessed and co-created. It is a framework and tool designed to support us in decentering the medical model from the way we access care, support, love or whatever words your community uses. RMHFA illuminates how colonial helping styles show up in so much of what is called “care,” the importance of curiosity, and how to promote community and connection in all of the work we do.

We invite you to join us on Monday, November 13 for a 2-hour virtual workshop that will offer context on the impact of oppression and social injustice on the bodymind and teach tangible de-escalation and consent skills. Oumou will go over the RMHFA Action Plan in depth, and provide the opportunity to ask questions, practice skills, and apply knowledge.

This event is open to a multi-stakeholder audience, including people with lived experience, people with professional "expertise", peer supporters/workers, licensed professionals, institutions, warm lines, and people who work with people. 

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitator

About the Series

This event is part of a new talk series inspired by IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum. It features members of our teaching faculty team and dives into timely topics that intersect with our transformative mental health lens. Enrollment for the curriculum is now open, and you can learn more here.

About the Event

Many mental health providers and advocates enter the field with the intention to make a difference, but find that the tools they are given aren’t enough, and the system doesn’t support lasting healing and change. As people cycle in and out of mental health services, mainstream discourse tends to individualize the problem – but what if the system itself is actually to blame? Meanwhile, a growing number of people are challenging the current paradigm and uplifting new approaches, asking critical questions like: Are there better ways of providing support? How can we bridge the gap between the reality of mental health services and a world in which people’s autonomy and self-determination are truly centered?

Join IDHA on Monday, September 18 to hear from people who have found healing outside the formal mental health care system, with critical wisdom to impart for those working within it. A panel of activists, survivors, and providers will share how they practice a transformative approach to mental health that honors choice and authenticity. Uplifting a diversity of roles and relationships to mental health, panelists will share how they have fostered community to bring about change in and outside the system, reflecting on the power of collectivity to support transformation. The event aims to instill a feeling of hope and connection, reminding us that we are not alone and a more liberatory future is possible.

This event is open to mental health workers and clinicians, researchers, educators, activists, survivors, peers, current and prior service users, writers, artists, and other advocates – anyone who is interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

Are you an activist, educator, artist, or care provider passionate about transforming how we understand and approach mental health? Are you interested in joining a growing community that is collectively seeding that change, while embodying the values of the world we wish to see? Have you felt drawn towards IDHA’s work, perhaps wondering how you can deepen your relationship to it?

On Tuesday, May 30 from 6:30-8 pm EST, IDHA is hosting a membership “open house” as an opportunity to experience the power of our community firsthand, and learn more about membership. Being a member of IDHA means that you share our vision of transformative mental health, and align with our organizational principles and values. By becoming a member, you join a growing community of mental health change makers and gain access to a handful of exciting perks and opportunities.

The evening will feature an art showcase and panel discussion featuring several current IDHA members, as well as share information about membership and different ways to get involved with our work. We especially encourage those who are curious and seeking to learn more about IDHA to join us.

Since officially launching membership at the end of 2020, we’ve seen our network grow in such inspiring ways. We would love to share this night with you, to celebrate how far we've come and make space to seed creative visions for our shared future.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Access

Automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please email contact@idha-nyc.org with any other access needs or questions about accessibility.

Facilitators

This space will be held by members of IDHA’s staff team and feature several of our members. Contributors will be added as they are confirmed!

About the Series

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two and a half years since, IDHA’s five panels have reached more than 10,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members.

We have thus far explored: the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response; the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion of marginalized communities; concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice; how to build community-based healing alternatives; and how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability.

About the Event

Psychiatry and psychology have been used to justify mistreatment and segregation since at least the early 1800s in the United States and remained largely unchallenged in mainstream culture until the 1960s civil rights era. For example, psychiatry has been used to bolster the institutions of slavery through psychiatric disorders (“drapetomania”) and scientific reports (e.g. by Dr. Samuel Cartwright) that deemed African Americans “biologically inferior” and pathologized those who tried to escape its reins (“protest psychosis”). The ideas underpinning these ideologies persist today, evident in the disparities in diagnostic rates, as well as the disproportionate criminalization and institutionalization of marginalized communities labeled as having a mental illness. There is a direct correlation between this insidious history and present-day efforts by the state to expand involuntary commitment.

On Monday, April 17, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures. This sixth installment will explore how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities, manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally. A panel of activists, survivors, researchers, providers, and other advocates will explore the history and current status of involuntary commitment in the United States, centered on the factors that have shaped how people approach mental health and the impact of this history on diagnosis and the mental health continuum. We will discuss key examples in New York City and California, demonstrating what these initiatives have in common and how they are indicative of a larger pattern. We will also share key resistance strategies grounded in lived experience wisdom.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

Join us for an evening of art exploration with artist/activist Kim Wichera and interdisciplinary artist/IDHA staff member Noah Gokul as they share work informed by topics of mental health, psychiatry, and their artistic practices. Following each artist’s presentation, Kim and Noah will pose questions to one another, inquiring as to how art can shift power dynamics in psychiatry and mental health.

Kim will present work that addresses the transformational processes of mental health and explores the localization of social lines of conflict in the private, and thus the inner. Through the use of video projections, voice, movement, installations, and sound, Kim will share insights into lived experience and how social exclusions are shaped.

Noah will share their visual art, which recently centered on the symbolism and resonances of the spiral, through multimedia explorations of their own experience with ‘spiraling’ mentally. Spirals, amongst other art practices, serve as their research into spaces of possibility at intersections of healing and liberation.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

This event is open to artists, creative writers, people with mental health difference, disability and social justice communities, social workers, therapists, mental health professionals, students, creative writing and art departments, psychology and social work departments, and the general public.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. The suggested donation for this event is $10, and we appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation and automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

Join us for an evening of disability culture as poet/dancer Stephanie Heit and interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas share work informed by their lived experience of mental health difference. Stephanie will read from her hybrid memoir poem, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), that takes you inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. Chanika will share her art, including drawing, sculpture, and performance  video that utilizes an archive of medication guides, post-treatment workbooks, medical texts, and prescription bottles that are transformed with iconography and found materials to question medical treatment versus individualized care and healthcare access. A facilitated Q&A will follow.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

This event is open to artists, creative writers, people with mental health difference, disability and social justice communities, social workers, therapists, mental health professionals, students, creative writing and art departments, psychology and social work departments, and the general public.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. The suggested donation for this event is $10, and we appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL interpretation and automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

About the Series

IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two years since, IDHA’s four panels have reached more than 7,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members. We have discussed the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response, the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities, concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice, and how to build community-based healing alternatives.

About the Event

At the two-year mark of this series, we are starting the Decarcerating Care lifecycle over. We reflect on the ways in which our landscape has intensified since the series began, bringing both new challenges and new opportunities to cultivate autonomy, self-determination, and liberation for those experiencing crisis and distress. Historically, mad, mentally ill, and disabled people have been surveilled at astonishingly high rates within hospitals and prisons; since deinstitutionalization, however, these populations have been increasingly surveilled by other means – in what scholar Liat Ben-Moshe has termed “carceral sanism.” Today, this pattern is evident in the expansion of mandatory reporting, particularly within Black, Native, and Latinx communities; the deployment of geolocation technologies by crisis hotlines in “active rescue” situations; and the advent of medications that utilize digital tracking systems to ensure compliance with treatment.

On October 17, 2022, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: The Evolution of Mental Health Surveillance. This fifth installment will examine how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability by reviewing historical examples and exposing present-day iterations. A panel of mad and disabled community members, mental health practitioners, activists, and scholars will explore responses within and adjacent to our mental health system that often result in coercion, confinement, and incarceration. Drawing on deep lineages of resistance – particularly by Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, mad, and queer communities – we will uplift ongoing resistance and movement efforts that respond to these covert forms of control and prioritize community-based frames for safety in pursuit of collective healing.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

For those of us working in mental health, this work is both personal and political. We are often able to point to moments in time that radicalized us to want to transform the system, whether as a result of personal encounters, or those experienced by loved ones. These moments of rupture hold trauma and grief, but they also open up the possibility for radical imagination – inviting us to build systems of care that are rooted in systemic change and lived experience.

In summer 2022, the Institute for the Development of Human Arts hosted three Adelphi University psychology students as interns. Rachel, Giselle, and Alex each came to IDHA with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and at different points in their professional journeys. Over the course of a summer internship, they all experienced revelations regarding mental health experiences, the system, and their own professional training. While some of these revelations have been experienced as ruptures, they also created openings for new knowledge and understandings of transformative mental health.

We invite you to join us on Thursday, September 22 from 7:30-9 pm EST for a virtual event to explore how moments of rupture can be harnessed to facilitate mental health change. IDHA interns Giselle, Rachel, and Alex will discuss how being part of the organization has shaped how they think about mental health and reshaped their future plans. Posing a series of questions to one another, and spotlighting a polyphony of voices from the IDHA community, there will be ample opportunity for community discussion.

This event is open to mental health professionals, peers, survivors, activists, artists, and mental health advocates of all kinds. We particularly encourage students to join us as we deconstruct what it means to be trained as a “mental health professional,” uplifting the value of unlearning in our education.

Register in advance via Zoom to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Age-trauma describes an experience specific to children and childhood – the result of youth oppression where we are taught to accept and normalize abuse, subjugation, hierarchy, and autonomy suppression. Liberating our Childishness allows us to access our inner creativity and freedom by tenderly reclaiming the young parts of us and young people that we have discarded.

Led by a young person with current lived experience of ageism, this unique workshop is essential for all those aligned with building a more care-filled world. Multidisciplinary artist, author, and activist Aiyana Goodfellow will offer a presentation, followed by the opportunity to engage with others in breakout rooms. Through discussion, reflection, and creative journaling, we will collectively explore the effects of age-trauma on both personal and systemic levels. This workshop is open to all those aligned with liberation and care ethics, those who have childhood trauma or negative childhood experiences, young people, mental health professionals, and peers. It will benefit all who work with young people in their personal and professional lives.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. The suggested donation for this event is $10, and we appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

Automated closed captioning will be provided; please submit any additional access needs via the registration form. The workshop will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitator

Aiyana Goodfellow

Aiyana Goodfellow is a young Black, nonbinary, neurodivergent, multidisciplinary artist, author and activist based in London, UK. Aiyana often writes and speaks about the parallels between speciesism, white supremacy, racism, anti-queerness, ageism and capitalism. They run multiple community projects and organisations namely The Radical Companionship Project, Anti-Speciesist Arts Collective, DELINQUENTS, and are the co-founding director of NEUROMANCERS a Black and Queer led abolitionist community organisation, for and by neurodivergents.

About the Project

In March 2022, Justice Arts Coalition and the Institute for the Development of Human Arts launched “The Art of Grief” to demonstrate the myriad shapes that grief can take, as well as the many ways that we can tend to our grief. The project centers the power of creativity to make meaning from and heal through grief, in contrast with medicalized approaches. An open call yielded 40+ submissions, which can be viewed via an online gallery.

About the Event

On Monday, July 18 from 6-8 pm EST, JAC and IDHA are hosting a virtual lived experience showcase to spotlight works submitted to “The Art of Grief,” with the hope of transmuting our collective grief into new narratives that celebrate the power of mutual support and community action. Ten artists or designated loved ones will present a curated selection of works, and attendees will have the opportunity to engage with and reflect on the art in small groups. We invite you to join us for an evening of creativity, solidarity, and connection – a communal effort to make the intangible, tangible.

This project particularly seeks to uplift the voices and experiences of those currently or formerly incarcerated in institutions. This includes, but is not limited to, those held in jails, prisons, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, and group homes. JAC coordinated the inclusion of works from incarcerated artists, and IDHA coordinated the inclusion of works by psychiatric and trauma survivors. This event is open to anyone who has been impacted by the experience of grief. It seeks to bridge dialogue about grief experiences among activists, artists, survivors, family members, advocates, mental health providers, and other community members.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

Donations

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event. Donations of any size help cover the costs of art supplies and shipping for incarcerated artists, as well as equipping the event with closed captioning and ASL interpretation.

Access

ASL interpretation and live closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants within a few days of the event alongside the caption transcript and a resource list.

Artists

Shinjini Bakshi

Shinjini is a queer, non-binary South Asian-American clinical social worker with lived experience as both a consumer and provider of mental health care. They work towards a vision of anti-carceral mental health and collective liberation.

Alisa Damaso

Alisa is a designer, illustrator, and writer living in San Francisco, California. Her bold and colorful work explores identity, joy, healing, and social justice. Alisa is author of the zines What’s Coming and Growing Up Valley. When she’s not making stuff, you can find her running at Golden Gate Park, listening to books and spooky podcasts, and singing in the band Vincent Gargiulo National Park.

Joshua Earls

I create paintings and drawings that I hope that viewers will be able to connect with on some emotional level. Though my subject matter may be diverse, each of my paintings have been of a person, a scene, an animal or an object which pulled on the strings of my heart in some way. Whether that is by eliciting a nostalgic longing, portraying an often-felt emotion or simply evoking awe in its beauty, they all somewhat represent me.

Matthew Harbin

Mostly I work in watercolor, pastel and charcoal but am branching out into oil wow and so far love it. I mostly, by necessity, have to work from pictures, but I sketch often to build my skills for drawing from life. Largely I do landscapes and wildlife. Sometimes I incorporate people into my work as well. Before coming to prison I spent most of my time hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, and just plain spending whatever time I could outdoors. Since for the time being I’m stuck here most of my work reflects memories or even just wishful thinking. Dreams of what my life had been. Since I can’t currently live those out it helps to at least express them through art. I also have a love of lighthouses that make up a large portion of my architecturals. I inherited this love from my mother as well as from me being a sailor in the U.S. Navy. Most of my work is expressionist/impressionist with some abstracted reality. ← If this is not a proper art term, it should be!

Brian Hindson

Regardless of what I’m painting, I really hope the viewer is left with some sort of impact. Be it a prison themed work or free world subject. I attempt to make you see it a little differently, maybe even better than the original.

Arlis Mara

Arlis is a psychiatric abuse survivor, writer, and radical social work student. They find joy in creating and their emotional support hedgehog: Thorazine. You can find them on social media at @notyourquietsurvivor.

Angy Rivera

Angy is a queer Colombian immigrant living in NYC. She is the Co-Executive Director at the New York State Youth Leadership Council. You can find her on social media @AskAngy.

Nicole Salcedo

Nicole is a Cuban American interdisciplinary artist born, raised and based in Miami, Florida. Salcedo earned her Bachelors in Fine Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010). Salcedo’s practice is anchored in drawing and expands out into various mediums, such as film, design and sculpture. Salcedo’s entire body of work revolves around the deepening of our connection to our bodies and the earth; creating energetically charged imagery through meticulous mark making that become portals into more subtle realms.

Cuong Mike Tran

I’ve always dabbled in drawing most of my life. As a kid I could look at a picture and draw what I saw. As I got older, school and work took priority; art was placed on the back burner. Forward some years and I find myself in prison. With a lot of time to sit and reflect, I picked up drawing again.

I’ve seen many talented artists in here working with graphite pencils and acrylic paints. I wanted to stand out, so I started to build and sculpt figurines out of whatever materials I could find. I didn’t have the faintest clue as to where and how to start. I fell back onto my mechanical background, constructing skeletal frames out of paper and cardboard lunch boxes. I then applied soap over the frames, creating “muscle and skin.” I would then paint over the dried soap using hand-me-down acrylic paints. Digging around, I was able to find scrap materials such as old t-shirts, silver burrito wrappers, and pen barrels (just to name a few things) and turn them into accessories for my figurines.

Things have snowballed from there. I’ve become more proficient at using the materials available to me (translation: junk) to make artwork. To date, I’ve made over 80 pieces here in prison, the major ones being a functioning carousel, a remote control go-kart, a scale sized Chevrolet impala, a 2 foot tall demon, and a post-apocalyptic diorama.

Always up to a challenge, I’ve recently taken up painting with acrylics. I am not formally trained. I’ve never taken an art class. I’m completely self-taught, so I believe that my work is described as ‘outsider art’ (ironic, because I’m currently in prison). As such, I’m severely limited by the availability of material, workspace, and inspiration. I am forced to be resourceful and resilient despite the physical and emotional constraints. So I like to think of myself as a ‘shackled artist.

Art has been very therapeutic for me. It allows me to free myself despite being physically restricted. In an environment where my every move is monitored and controlled, my ideas, creativity and imagination are the only things that are limitless. Art is freedom; it allows me to put a part of myself onto paper or in a sculpture. Art also allows me to show society that I am still a human being, that I am not defined by my mistakes.

Skills: I am not formally trained in any medium. However, I have found a natural affinity with graphite pencils and charcoal. Recently, I have started to paint using my acrylics. My sculpting abilities consist of forming skeletal frames using found materials and covering them with soap instead of modeling clay. I have a strong mechanical background. I am also fluent in English and Vietnamese and am teaching myself Spanish through books and full immersion. I play the acoustic guitar as well.

Sean White

I typically develop figurative pieces on two dimensions. Primarily I focus on oil, though also graphic narrative and these trippy mosaic-like collages (most frequently portraits). The Bauhaus doctrines have had great influence on my process and subject matter. I have read Albers and Kandinsky a couple of times, and even have versions of Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Interactions of Color in my possession (the Kandinsky I found as an e-text in our public domain library). All of that, though stems from Goethes Farbenlehre which if you remove the 19th century science, is brilliant in its own right. Of course, even the two-dimensional Bauhausler theories extend from the initial efforts to deconstruct the picture plane Cézanne made. So, I would say my work explores illusions in many respects, though it follows a linear branch of modernism a la Fernand Léger. I mean to say illusionism as it relates to the picture plane. Comic books have also heavily influenced my perception of art. Little boxes containing images and a few words stacked together on a single page to forward a story. The combination fascinates me.

About the Series

Since September 2020, IDHA’s Decarcerating Care discussion series has reached more than 6,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors. Prior installments explored how to maintain the safety and health of our communities while preserving the rights and autonomy of those in crisis; the ways in which services and "reforms" inherently uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities; and concrete steps and tools providers can take to decarcerate their practice.

About the Event

The mental health system is steeped in oppressive ideologies and histories. White supremacy is responsible for the erasure and co-optation of Indigenous cultures of care, healing practices, and ways of knowing that bring us closer to collective liberation. In order to transform and divest from oppressive systems that prioritize control over care, commercialize distress, and treat symptoms rather than root causes, we must bridge ancient practices with emergent possibilities, while not appropriating those practices. This involves honoring and uplifting traditional forms of knowledge, and drawing upon decades of organizing – led by and for mad, disabled, and neurodivergent activists and survivors – that have yielded strategies that can be tailored and workshopped for a wide range of contexts.

On March 28, 2022, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Community-Based Healing Alternatives and How to Build Them. This fourth installment will explore the ways in which white supremacy plays out in the mental health system and movement spaces, and how we can draw upon traditional knowledge and lived experience to create more accountable, effective, and healing-centered alternatives. The success of the movement for transformative mental health depends upon our collective ability to imagine a different world, and to move others to action with these creative visions. To that end, panelists will share their experiences building and sustaining care systems that prioritize well-being, autonomy, and dignity. We seek to uplift a spectrum of formal to informal strategies, as well as those that can be deployed in and outside the public mental health system.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

December 9, 2021 will be IDHA’s first ever open celebration,
and everyone’s invited.

This unique virtual event will include:

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
ART AND EXPERIENCE AUCTION
SWAG GIVEAWAY
LIVE MEMBER PERFORMANCES
….AND MORE!

ASL + CART will be provided. Email us at contact@idha-nyc.org for any questions about access.

About the Event

IDHA’s Decarcerating Care discussion series has reached more than 5,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors. The inaugural installment, Taking Policing Out of Mental Health Crisis Response, explored the carceral nature of mental health crisis response and how to maintain the safety and health of our communities while preserving the rights and autonomy of those in crisis. Part two, Challenging Criminalization and Control in Mental Health, deconstructed the prevailing narrative around the decriminalization of mental illness and explored ways in which services and "reforms" inherently uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities. 

On Monday, September 20, 2021, we will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Laying the Foundations for Liberated Practice. Those of us who work as “professionals” in the mental health system have the opportunity and responsibility to cede power to those with lived experience in order to transform the systems that perpetuate oppression and harm for marginalized communities. This third installment will include a panel of mental health workers, individuals with lived experience, and activists working within and outside of the systems that intersect with mental health to present concrete steps and tools for decarcerating your practice, as well as methods for caring for ourselves in the face of institutional barriers and backlash.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

About the Event

Humans have been creating music since time immemorial. Music-making has historically served a range of purposes in community, including entertainment, celebration, and practicality. Many shamanic practitioners create music that emulates natural soundscapes to aid spirituality and healing. Music has also played a crucial role in all social and political movements, conveying powerful messages and transforming the experience of struggle into a more integrated and profound communal ethos.

Our inherent fluency in music-making can be nurtured and encouraged. Music therapy is a modality that uses music to support the healing of people of all backgrounds and abilities. The music therapist's role is not to teach individuals how to play an instrument, but to use music as a medium for emotional healing.

In this community event, composer and music therapist Dorian Wallace will ground us in social movement music and radical politics to explore how we can apply elements of music therapy to mental health, integrating it within a social-political perspective in order to strengthen community activism.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is open to all humans, including peers, clinicians, people with lived experience of trauma and oppression, musicians, educators, and helpers of all kinds. Automated closed captioning will be provided, and the event will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Please note: IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs. We appreciate contributions of any size for those who have capacity to give. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitator

Dorian Wallace, MT - BC,  is a composer, pianist, board certified music therapist, and teacher based in New York City. His work addresses socio-political issues and philosophical concepts, often incorporating improvisation. He has collaborated with artists such as Bonita Oliver, John Sanborn, Paul Pinto, Pamela Z, Charlotte Mundy, Frank London, and Nicholas Finch, to name a few.

Wallace is a founding member and co-artistic director of Tenth Intervention, a progressive new music collective exploring the intersectionality of social justice and community engagement through contemporary music. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he founded the New Music Organizing Caucus, contemporary classical music advocacy, and labor rights collective to address systemic inequalities within the field. With David Kulma, Dorian co-hosts Trysteropod, an anarchist podcast discussing politics from a musician’s perspective. He is a Sing In Solidarity member, a socialist movement chorus in New York City that performs music from the international and domestic left.

One of New York City’s most in-demand dance accompanists, Wallace has played for Martha Graham Dance Company, Doug Varone and Dancers, Juilliard, New York University, Columbia University, and many, many others. He also teaches Music for Dancers at the Martha Graham School and is a teaching artist for the Mark Morris Dance Accompaniment Training Program.

Wallace received a BA in Music Therapy from Montclair State University, studying under Dr. Brian Abrams and Dr. Michael Viega. He completed an internship at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine and MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care. Dorian completed his Level 1 training in Guided Imagery and Music from Atlantis Institute for Consciousness and Music. He leads music therapy and mindfulness meditation groups through his private practice, Mederi Music, as well as American Humanist Association, and About Face - Veterans Against the War. Wallace is a United States Army veteran after serving for 10 years.

He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

About the Event

Not all ancestors lived honorable lives. We see this in intergenerational traumas, but what does it mean to reconcile this truth with our (un)learning processes? This virtual conversation facilitated by writer and cultural organizer Veronica Agard uses intergenerational compassion as a lens to acknowledge complex ancestries and create a path forward. 

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is open to all humans, including peers, clinicians, people with lived experience of trauma and oppression, educators, and helpers of all kinds. Automated closed captioning will be provided, and the event will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Please note: IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs. We appreciate contributions of any size for those who have capacity to give. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

About Ancestors in Training

Ancestors in Training (AIT) is a living project and lived experience that centers sacred traditions, new technologies, and intergenerational healing. Evolving with the times, AIT as a praxis examines how to apply the lessons of the past as a means to shape a better present and future for those that come after us. Through inquiry-based creative processes, critical race and media theories, and archival memory - the educational project allows all those who enter to leave with a better sense of self and how they relate to the world.

Facilitator

Veronica Agard (she/her) is a writer and cultural organizer at the intersections of Black identity, wellness, representation, and culture. Of Afro-Caribbean, African-American and Indigenous descent, she experiments with creative healing modalities and puts theories learned into practice. In addition to bylines at Redefining Our Womanhood, Black Girl Magik, Life as Ceremony and Black and Well; Veronica has brought Ancestors in Training to the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, El Museo del Barrio, Ethel's Club, Mayday Space, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to name a few. She graduated magna cum laude from CUNY City College in 2014 and is pursuing a master of social work degree from Fordham University.

About the Event

BIPOC communities facing health/mental health injustices hold expertise as to the flaws and harms of the Western biomedical model onto our mind-bodies and lives. This workshop will highlight the intersection between food justice, physical and mental wellbeing through group activities and discussion. Join food justice organizer Ana Morán, urban farmer and educator Sheryll Durant, and community chef Sia Pickett to explore how we can use food as leverage towards community liberation and healing. The event will invite active participation from the audience to learn and share.

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is open to all humans, including peers, clinicians, people with lived experience of trauma and oppression, educators, and helpers of all kinds.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join. Automated closed captioning will be provided, and the event will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Please note: IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

Ana Moran currently works as the Community Food Coordinator for Community Access, assisting tenants and staff in supportive housing to expand opportunities to grow and eat fresh produce, and engage in food-related entrepreneurial initiatives. Originally from Guatemala, Ana is an incredibly passionate food justice organizer who has worked at various points along the food chain, including being a food vendor, restaurant worker, farmer and entrepreneur. She has also worked in various communities engaging in urban farming projects. Ana is deeply connected to the intersections between food, immigration, and culture.

Sheryll Durrant is an urban farmer, educator, and food justice advocate. She has been the Resident Garden Manager at Kelly Street Garden since 2016, and is also the Food and Nutrition Coordinator for New Roots Community Farm, managed by International Rescue Committee (IRC). Her work has included developing community-based urban agriculture projects, providing expertise and technical assistance for gardens within supportive housing developments, and she currently serves as Board President for Just Food. Sheryll has led workshops and spoken on issues related to urban agriculture and food justice for many key organizations, and was part of the 2019-2020 HEAL School of Political Leadership cohort. As a former Design Trust fellow for the Farming Concrete project, she is now responsible for communications and outreach for the data collection platform that helps urban farmers and gardeners measure their impact. Prior to her work in urban agriculture, Sheryll spent over 20 years in corporate and institutional marketing.

Sia Pickett, affectionately known in her community as Chef Sia, started with Just Food as a Community Chef in 2011, eventually moving into the treasurer role through her commitment and dedication to the organization’s mission. Sia brings 30+ years of experience in fiscal oversight as a business owner, culinary/nutrition instructor, wellness coach, facilitator, management and mentoring, curriculum development, project/event coordination, marketing, business technology application, business consultation, and business development. She has worked in operational and sales management for various fortune 500 companies, spent 12 years working in personal banking with US Bank, and has held positions with several nonprofits. Sia currently serves as project coordinator for Business Outreach Center Network (BOC), and has worked as a project manager for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In addition to her community work, Chef Sia owns Malata Cuisine, a “Natural Foods'' personal chef service and culinary nutrition education company in Brooklyn, NY.

About the Event

Harm Reduction is popularly misunderstood as "doing less drugs" - a misunderstanding that may keep us from embracing and leaning-in to the core tenets of this approach: peer-driven, person-centered, non-judgmental, trauma-informed, and low-threshold engagement and services. These are the same tenets that we prioritize when using harm reduction approaches to psychiatry and mental health concerns.  In this community event, harm reductionists Jay Stevens and Al Ostapeck will discuss the core of Harm Reduction, the philosophy that informs the practice, and explore how identifying and challenging our own internalized biases leads to the ability to support all people with gentleness, right where they're at. Whether for mental health concerns, substance use concerns, self-injury/harm, sex and sex-work, or challenging harmful systems, using a harm reduction lens is transformative for all parties - including you! 

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. The event is open to all humans, including “clinicians," people with lived mental health and/or substance use concerns, family members of the same, and helpers of all kinds.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join. Automated closed captioning will be provided, and the event will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Please note: IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Facilitators

Jason (Jay) Stevens (he, him), MHC-LP, CASAC, MA, CARC, ADS identifies as a person with lived experience of unhelpful substance use, homelessness, and incarceration. After having his eyes opened to the systemic harms caused by structural racism, classism, patriarchy, the War on Drugs, and white supremacy, Jay dedicated the remainder of his life to supporting others who are suffering, and helping to transform unjust systems. A mental health counseling limited permit holder, Acupuncture Detoxification Specialist, harm reductionist, trainer and activist, Jay now works on a New York City ACT Team as a Harm Reduction Specialist supporting those living in mental health homeless shelters and Supportive Housing in NYC. He believes deeply in the healing power of human connections born of non-judgment, and strives to support the creation of a transformative mental health system led by people with lived experience.

Al Ostapeck (they/them) is a harm reductionist and drug user living in Brooklyn, NY. Experiences in the medical system, psychiatric system, and witnessing the destruction of other oppressive systems have pushed them to be deeply invested in the liberation of oppressed people within their communities and throughout the world. Al began practicing harm reduction as a young person, helping friends and people in the community stay safe while using drugs. They have worked in a syringe exchange program at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center and as a Harm Reduction Specialist working in housing at Community Access. Al will be returning to LESHRC to continue working toward improving and expanding harm reduction services in the Lower East Side. In their free time, they enjoy studying revolutionary history and theory and finding new ways to make seitan and experimenting with fermentation with their partner.

About the Event

What does myth have to do with mental health? More than one might imagine. The Hero’s Journey was described by Joseph Campbell as a way to understand the similarities he noticed in folklore and mythologies throughout history and worldwide.

On April 19th from 6-8 pm EST, IDHA and facilitators JoAnn Dorio Burton, CPRP and Kristin Becker, LCMHCA are hosting a workshop that explores the Hero's Journey as an empowering way for individuals and practitioners to conceptualize life experiences in ways that are person-centered, de-stigmatizing, and cross-cultural. This event expands upon themes covered in the November 2020 IDHA workshop "How to Convert Your Life Into Legend".

Joined by storyteller and previous IDHA presenter Audrey Dimola, the trio will traverse the stages of the Journey (including Departure/Separation, On The Road/Initiation, and Return/Transformation), discuss how to engage the Hero's Journey in your life and practice, and explore how to invoke specific myths to deepen resonance and internal explorations in the way that only the Old Stories can-- with the rich example of the Grail Legend that centers around Parsifal, the Wounded Fisher King, and the courage to ask the necessary questions.

Register* in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing Zoom information about how to join, along with a reminder email a few hours before the event. Automated closed captioning will be provided, and the event will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

*There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is designed for a multi-stakeholder audience. The workshop is designed to bridge the mental health needs of the "clinician" and of the "client.”

Please note: IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Presenters

JoAnn Dorio Burton, CPRP, is an educator, trainer, consultant and author and works as the Community Programs Coordinator at Windhorse Community Services, in Boulder Colorado. She is a longtime advocate of community mental health, clubhouse programs, and psychiatric rehabilitation. In collaboration with Kristin Becker she created Hero’s Journey: Path to Well-being (formerly Hero’s Journey of Recovery) based on the work of Joseph Campbell. She has a BA degree in Therapeutic Recreation and Sociology, (concentration Social Work) from Lehman College, CUNY and attended the Transpersonal Counseling Program at Naropa University. In 2018, JoAnn received the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner Award.You can find out more about her Hero’s Journey workshops and trainings at www.herosjourneyworkshops.com

Kristin Becker, LCMHCA is a licensed clinical mental health counselor in Asheville, NC. She has counseled youth aged 4 through 17 in both school and wilderness settings. She met JoAnn Dorio Burton in 2014 at Windhorse Community Services where they developed their framework inspired by the shared experiences of those undergoing mental health challenges and the work of Joseph Campbell. She continues to incorporate this framework into her work with youth.

Audrey Dimola is a born-and-raised NYC artist, storyteller, and dancer adventuring in myth, ecological wellness, and wild body dreaming. She carries lived experience of neurodivergence, altered states, and past mental illness diagnosis; the Hero's Journey, and working with the Sacred Aliveness in Story, quite literally saved her life. Audrey is a lifelong writer/poet and multidisciplinary performer and has nearly a decade of experience as a celebrated event curator, organizer, and sacred space-holder working creatively in diverse communities. She holds a Certificate in Ecotherapy from the Earthbody Institute and facilitated the November 2020 IDHA event, "How To Convert Your Life Into Legend: Inside the Hero's Journey."

About the Event

In September 2020, IDHA hosted a public panel discussion called Decarcerating Care: Taking Policing Out of Mental Health Crisis Response, which explored the carceral nature of mental health crisis response through the voices and experiences of survivors and people with lived experience.

On Thursday March 4, 2021, we will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Challenging Criminalization and Control in Mental Health, a panel that will deconstruct the prevailing narrative around the decriminalization of mental illness and explore ways in which public mental health services and well-meaning "reforms" inherently uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities. Panelists will explore the stigmatization and surveillance often experienced by those seeking or mandated to treatment, recognizing that mental healthcare is not immune from the systems of oppression inherent to racial capitalism. By again uplifting a range of expertise and lived experiences from diverse backgrounds and identities, the panel will focus on harmful practices within mental health treatment that inhibit self-determination and maintain the status quo, while amplifying approaches to politicized care and community-based alternatives that keep us safe while accessing the healing we need and deserve.

Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.

Donations

IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.

Access

ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

Panelists

Moderator

Many early career clinicians enter the field having been provided a limited view of the history of mental health treatment as a whole. Further, many individuals lack tangible tools to maintain their own mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being in the face of dehumanizing processes. 

On Monday, February 8th IDHA is offering a virtual workshop that examines the history of mental health treatment in the United States and the use of poetry as a therapeutic tool. Poetry provides a unique medium for proposing new ways of being in the world and framing struggle, in ways more playful and empathetic than traditional modalities. Using selective snapshots, Autistic social worker and spoken word poet Steven T. Licardi will invite clinicians to explore the legacy of mental health treatment and to critically examine the ways in which we each, individually and collectively, continue to contribute to that legacy. Throughout this examination, participants will familiarize themselves with creative writing techniques, such as erasure/blackout poetry, letter writing, list making, and the golden shovel, as a means of subverting narratives. Participants are asked to come prepared to create and to reflect.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is designed for a multi-stakeholder audience. The workshop is designed to bridge the mental health needs of the "clinician" and of the "client.”

Facilitator

Steven T. Licardi is a social worker, spoken word poet, actor, and performance activist working at the intersections of art and social policy. He travels domestically and internationally using the power of spoken word to create empathic dialogue around, to confront the realities of, and to assist communities in dismantling the stigma surrounding mental health and mental illness. As a child, Steven was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum, an experience that has deeply informed his professional work. Since 2016, his ever-evolving performance series "Coup de Mot" has been confronting how mental illnesses manifest out of oppressive social pathologies, with versions appearing in Vigo, Spain in 2016, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 2018, and in Thessoliniki, Greece in 2019. His most recent collection of poems, ‘a billion burning dreams’ (STL, 2018) traces his own mental health journey from patient to professional. www.thesvenbo.com

Exquisite Corpse poem that was composed in the Chat during the event:

You exist
dear chosen, be anything....
perhaps
along with me
no matter what it looks like
An affair I have
In your prismed silence
Different, calmness
Bring me the warmth in my belly
I never thought before
My buzzing eyes ears nose life
Be hungry . . . beyond food.
we find you wild
Distracting like a fearscape
sleeplessness my friend
you are here and smiling
lost minds
We can wander
lost minutes
navigate the world where the branches always reach out to meet you
dear destiny:
missed connections
uncertainty can mean distress, but also endless possibilities
Remember to Love Yourself first. then you can bring the Love to others, too!

On Thursday, January 14, IDHA is offering a workshop, during which participants will learn a variety of mind-body practices to help with dysregulated states including anxiety and depression, insomnia, rumination and difficulty focusing. A brief overview of how trauma affects the nervous system will be shared with an understanding of how using the conscious connection of the mindbody increases resiliency and wellness. Breathwork, Mindful Movement such as Qi Gong, Yoga and Play, Meditation and Restorative Postures will be utilized. All practices are trauma informed and appropriate for all bodies.

Register in advance via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join.

There is a suggested $10 donation for this event, but no one will be turned away. This event is open to all humans, including clinicians, caregivers, activists, humanitarian aid workers, and medical professionals.

Facilitator

Gina de la Chesnaye is a core faculty member of Second Response which tends to the emotional & psychological needs of people exposed to trauma, providing body-centered methods to relieve the harmful effects of stress, distress & trauma. Most recently Second Response served survivors of sex-trafficking, refugees, street-children and the women in Uganda and Kenya. Gina also leads trauma informed trainings and Care for the Caregiver workshops for clinicians and  street counselors. She serves as key faculty for The Lineage Project, bringing mindfulness based exercises, yoga and meditation to at-risk and/or incarcerated youth and their support staff in New York City. 

Gina is also the Founder and Director of The Nachan Project which serves the women and children of the Katwe slums in Kampala, Uganda and offers Mindfulness and Trauma Management Trainings to social workers, street counselors, trauma therapists and caregivers throughout Uganda.

Gina is the Trauma Resource Director of the International Center for Mental Health and Human Rights where she facilitates mindful movement, yoga and meditation, a component of the Contemplative Based Trauma and Resilience Training. 

She is an alumna of the 2017 Harvard Global Mental Health Trauma & Recovery Certificate Program. She also offers Contemplative Care classes to the Columbia School of Social Work, NYU and Baruch College as a visiting lecturer. Gina recently lectured on and led Care for the Caregiver at the 3rd Annual Joint UCPA (Uganda Clinical Psychology) and UBHA (Uganda Behavioral Health Alliance) conference at the University of Kisubi, Entebbe, Uganda.

Gina recently co-taught a 300 Hour Yoga, Meditation and Dharma Teacher Training at The Three Jewels Outreach Center in NYC with Michael Hewett. 

She is a contributing writer and photographer to The Huffington Post, NY Yoga + Life and YogaCityNYC and has written numerous articles on yoga, meditation, martial arts and Buddhism.

Dedicated to humanitarian relief, she has spent several years focusing on trauma and resiliency work with children in orphanages, schools, IDP camps and monasteries throughout Nepal with the volunteer organization 108 Lives. In March of 2018, Gina led a team of 13 volunteers. 

She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her two daughters and has a private practice working with trauma survivors in New York City and is the lead collaborator on integrative practices with The Therapy Collective.