Transbox with Rounded Edges

2024 marks the publication of the Mad Studies Reader, a book that brings together writing and artwork from service users, daring activists, critical scholars, concerned clinicians, and innovative artists! As people excluded from mainstream definitions of mental health and mental health care are increasingly finding ways to get their voices heard, the Mad Studies Reader explores this progress and presents us with hope as well as awareness of the challenges that lie ahead as we collectively work to build a world that embraces rather than divides.

Join IDHA as we celebrate the launch of this groundbreaking book and the increasing solidarity and excitement around mad studies and allied fields. This celebration is organized to bring artists, scholars, clinicians, and activists together. We will start with an opening discussion of the term “mad studies” followed by panel presentations from each of these areas. Before each panel we will have presentations from the artists in the book. After each section we will have discussions in large and small group settings. We look forward to having you learn and journey with us as we come together to explore mad studies as a field of inquiry, a framework for transformation, and a movement for social change!

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Schedule at-a-glance

12:00-12:20 pm EST	Opening Remarks	From IDHA: Jessie Roth, Nia Nelson From the Editors: Bradley Lewis, Jazmine Russell, Alisha Ali
12:20-1:10 pm EST	Plenary Panel: What is Mad Studies?	Panelists: Alisha Ali, Debbie-Ann Chambers, Sascha DuBrul, Leah Harris Moderated by: Jazmine Russell, Bradley Lewis
1:20-1:35 pm EST	Innovative Artists Interlude	Jacks McNamara, Lorna Collins
1:35-2:50 pm EST	Daring Activists	Readings and Presentations: Kelechi Ubozoh, Raj Mariwala, Benon Kabale Mini Workshop: Chris Hansen
3:00-3:15 pm EST	Innovative Artists Interlude	Issa Ibrahim, Sabrina Chap
3:15-4:30 pm EST	Critical Scholars	Readings and Presentations: Erica Fletcher, Lennard Davis, Patty Douglas and Estée Klar Mini Workshop: Hayley Stefan
4:35-4:40 pm EST	Book Giveaway
4:40-5:55 EST	Concerned Clinicians	Readings and Presentations: Noel Hunter, Marilyn Charles, Jennifer Poole and Stephanie LeBlanc Mini Workshops: Gitika Talwar, Will Hall

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Pricing

The pricing structure for the symposium is designed to create choice and access — in pursuit of IDHA’s goal to share transformative mental health knowledge with as many people as possible. Registration fees go towards compensating the symposium contributors, virtual platform costs, providing ASL interpretation during the live event, and sustaining our small staff team.

Three pricing tiers are available, and we invite you to choose the one that is most accessible for you. If you don’t see a pricing tier that works for you, please reach out to us at contact@idha-nyc.org.

What you get:	reduced $35	general rate $79	supporter $110
Live entry to 6-hour symposium	✓	✓	✓
Recording and resource list	✓	✓	✓
Raffle entries for a free copy of the Mad Studies Reader	1	3	5
5 Continuing Education (CE) credits	-	✓	✓
Subsidize another participant and help sustain IDHA's work	-	-	✓

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Detailed Schedule

This schedule is being updated on an ongoing basis as speakers and facilitators are confirmed.

12:00-12:20 pm EST

IDHA Opening Remarks

Jessie Roth

Jessie is IDHA's Director. She is a writer and activist organizing at the intersection of mental health and social justice. A longtime organizer with IDHA, she has supported the development of initiatives such as Mental Health Trialogue, a forum bridging peers, family members, and providers. Inspired by her family’s experiences with the mental health system, Jessie’s work is focused on the healing power of storytelling and the importance of cross-movement organizing for mental health liberation. Her writing has been published in the book We've Been Too Patient: An Anthology of Voices from Radical Mental Health, the Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the Village Voice. Read Full Bio

Nia Nelson

Nia is IDHA's Administrative Coordinator. They are an organizer, health educator, artist and activist. They have organized in various cross-movement spaces, most notably at the intersections of Black and Queer liberation, mental health, Black spirituality and interfaith liberation theology. As a trauma survivor and person of Black and Filipino lineage, their lived experiences and innate gifts inform their unwavering commitment to building upon ancestral legacies of spiritual healing practices and colonial resistance. As a music curator, producer and herbalist, they also tenderly hold the healing, storytelling, and connective powers of music and the land close to them and incorporate them into their personal and community praxes. Read Full Bio

Editor Opening Remarks

Alisha Ali

Alisha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University where she heads the Advocacy and Community-Based Trauma Studies (ACTS) Lab. Her research examines the mental health effects of various forms of oppression... including racism and poverty. She is co-editor (with Bradley Lewis and Jazmine Russell) of the upcoming book “The Mad Studies Reader” (Routledge Press). Her current projects are investigating the effects of empowerment-based interventions for domestic violence survivors and low-income high school students, and the impact of an arts-based intervention to treat the effects of traumatic stress in military veterans. Alisha received her PhD in Applied Cognitive Science from the University of Toronto and completed her postdoctoral fellowship training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Read Full Bio

Bradley Lewis

Bradley is a psychotherapist/psychiatrist in private practice and a humanities professor at New York University. He is devoted to enriching everyday life and clinical practice through integration with the arts, humanities, and cultural/political/religious study. In addition to co-editing the Mad Studies Reader, his books include Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature and Cinema; Narrative Psychiatry; and Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: Birth of Postpsychiatry. Read Full Bio

Jazmine Russell

Jazmine Russell is the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, a transformative mental health educator, trauma survivor, and host of "Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast." She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Mad Studies, Critical Psychology, and Neuroscience, and a postgraduate student at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Jazmine has worked in the mental health system as a crisis counselor and later as a peer counselor specializing in working with those experiencing 'psychosis.' Becoming disillusioned with the system, she became a grassroots mental health organizer and holistic counselor across many modalities since 2015. She continues to see clients as a trauma-informed holotropic breathwork practitioner. She is also a co-editor of the Mad Studies Reader, published by Routledge in 2024. Read Full Bio

12:20-1:10 pm EST

Plenary Panel: What is Mad Studies?

“Mad Studies” is an emerging term for rethinking and reimagining the ways we traditionally approach mental health and wellbeing. It opens to a paradigm that liberates us from rigid categories and sanist prejudice, and it helps realign who gets to contribute to the conversations around mental difference. This panel brings together four people who are at the forefront of mad studies to talk about what mad studies means to them and how they use it in their lives.

Alisha Ali

Alisha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University and co-editor of "The Mad Studies Reader." Her full bio is available above, in the Editor Opening Remarks section.

Debbie Ann-Chambers

Debbie-Ann is a licensed counselling psychologist, certified poetry therapy practitioner and trained cultural therapist. She has worked for over a decade in Jamaica providing community mental health services. A pivotal point in her career was working with... Transcultural Psychiatrist Professor Frederick Hickling where she learned to apply her passion for liberation psychology to a revolutionary and decolonial arts based community mental health model. Currently, she is a psychologist at the University Counselling Service at The University of the West Indies Mona where she continues to learn, struggle with and apply liberation, embodied and arts based methodologies in mental health care. Read Full Bio

Sascha DuBrul

Sascha is the co-founder of The Icarus Project, a network of peer based mental health support groups and media project dedicated to redefining the language and culture of mental health and illness. He has a Masters from Silberman School of Social Work... and worked from 2016-2019 as a Recovery Specialist and Trainer at Columbia’s Center for Practice Innovations at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is currently a trainer at the Institute for the Development of Human Arts. He is the co-author of Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, Friends Make the Best Medicine: A Guide to Creating Community Mental Health Support Networks, and the author of Maps to the Other Side: The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer. Sascha maintains a public/private practice and resides in Los Angeles with his partner, Alice, and their 3 year old twins, Lilah and Silas. Read Full Bio

Leah Harris

Leah is a mad, queer, and disabled writer, facilitator, and advocate of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish heritage. Their work focuses on autonomy and choice, surveillance/tech in the mental health/suicide prevention space, the history of... carceral mental health, and psychiatric abolition. Their writing has appeared in The Progressive Magazine, Passengers Journal, Rooted in Rights, the Disability Visibility Project, and Mad in America; and in the anthologies We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health, Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, and the Mad Studies Reader. Read Full Bio

Moderated by

Jazmine Russell

Bradley Lewis

1:10-1:20 pm EST

Break

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Innovative Artists Interlude

The arts can open new worlds, new perspectives, and new possibilities. They can help us step out of our usual frames of normal and pathological so we can imagine and embody multiple mad-positive alternatives. Jacks McNamara (one of the contributing artists and the cover artist for the Mad Studies Reader) calls this the world of “lilies and urine.” Bringing “lilies and urine” together allows a mad studies embrace of the world in all its complexity—without expectation of pure or impure, beautiful or spoiled, cleanliness or clarity, normality or pathology, sweetness or stench. In that way all art can be mad art that can engage in mental life and mental difference afresh. Out of this broader art world, those artists that consider themselves mad artists self-identify with “lived experiences” that can be, or have been, labeled “mental illness.” Their work is particularly invaluable to mad studies because they are living and expressing these experiences anew and their work opens to personal, cultural, spiritual, and social transformations.

1:05-1:20 pm EST

Event Layout

Jacks McNamara

Jacks is a trauma healing coach, facilitator, educator, writer, and artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jacks has been in private practice for 11 years, with a specialty in supporting queer and trans trauma survivors, and in mentoring new queer and trans healing practitioners. They have been peer counseling, facilitating support groups, teaching art and writing classes, and leading workshops around radical mental health since 2004. Jacks is a member of the Generative Somatics Politicized Healers Network and a graduate of the gs Somatics and Trauma practitioner training program. In 2002 Jacks co-founded The Icarus Project, now known as the Fireweed Collective, an international support network and participatory adventure in mutual aid and healing justice. Co-author of Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, their life and work are the subject of the poetic documentary Crooked Beauty. Jacks also hosts the podcast So Many Wings, a series of conversations at the intersection of social justice and transformative mental health. You can find them on the web at https://jacksmcnamara.net. Read Full Bio

Jacks will read from Inbetweenland, their original collection of poetry and prose, putting into practice the poetic principle of "lilies and urine" – which calls for an embrace of the world in all its complexity.

Lorna Collins

Lorna is an artist, filmmaker, writer and researcher in creative health. She writes about art, philosophy and mental health in books such as Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics. She also writes fiction and poetry. Lorna is currently working on a documentary film about her lived experience of brain injury and mental illness, and she is leading an Arts Council-funded research project (“A Creative Transformation”) about the brain, trauma, and creativity. Read Full Bio

Lorna will bring together deep scholarship in the transformative potentials of art with her own non-ordinary experiences and artistic creations. She will tell the story of how her arts practice helped her work through a period when her life was engulfed by constant visual and aural hallucinations.

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Daring Activists

Mad activists are part of a social movement that has gone by many names: “mad liberation,” “antipsychiatry,” “mental patients’ liberation,” “psychiatric survivor,” “ex-patient,” “ex-inmate,” “mental health consumer,” “c/s/x” (short for consumer/survivor/ex-patient), “neurodiversity,” “radical mental health,” “mad resistance,” “mad pride,” and simply “the movement.” The variety of terms for what can be seen as a single movement speaks to the common ground and the diversity of concerns, perspectives, and histories of the people involved in mad activism. The key common-ground issues are the social toxins of sanism, epistemic injustice, structural inequality—and the way these can create harmful experiences: over diagnosis, overmedication, overtreatment, incarceration, forced abuse, and failure to develop mad-positive alternatives. Mental health care and the normative social structures that surround it can be wounding in multiple ways: physically, psychologically, spiritually, socially, and politically. Mad activists believe another world is possible and work to make it so.

1:35-2:25 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

Kelechi Ubozoh

Kelechi is a Nigerian-American writer and mental health consultant with over a decade of experience working in the California mental health system in the areas of research and advocacy, community engagement, suicide prevention, and peer support. Her story of surviving a suicide attempt is featured in... The S Word documentary, O, The Oprah Magazine and CBS This Morning with Gayle King. Her book with LD Green, We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health, elevates marginalized voices of lived experience who have endured psychiatric mistreatment is featured in the curriculum at Boston University and is now available as an audiobook. Her work is featured in the forthcoming books, When We Exhale, Self-Care in Social Work, Beyond the Carceral State: Forensic Psychology and Black Resistance, We Are Here: Mental Health Therapists, Academics, and Leaders with Lived Experience of Mental Health Challenges, and Mad Studies Reader. Read Full Bio

Kelechi will draw upon her knowledge as a mental health practitioner and her personal experiences of healing to share about the power of community as a space for personal and collective growth. She will bring together voices of leaders of the Black Movement to share their insights on the Mad Movement.

Raj Mariwala

Raj is Director of Mariwala Health Initiative an advocacy, capacity building and grant making organisation focusing on mental health for historically marginalised communities. Currently, Raj serves on the board of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP). While their work on mental health is from a space of lived experience, their day job is as a practising Canine and Feline behaviourist. Read Full Bio

Philanthropy in mental health too often ends up supporting normative perspectives that are part of the problem in mental health care in the first place. Raj will engage with ways of reimagining philanthropy as usual in mental health.

Benon Kabale

Kabale Benon Kitafuna is a mental health care reform activist and author. Benon currently leads the Mental Health Recovery Initiative, a lived experience expert Advocacy Organisation in Uganda, and works with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a training advisor and consultant... for the SUCCEED Project. Benon studied Law at Makerere University in 2004 and Human Rights Law at Law Development Centre, Kampala in 2023. Benon worked with Butabika National Mental Referral Hospital in Uganda between 2012-2018, was a Fellow at Validity Foundation in 2017. Read Full Bio

Benon will provide intimate context of the public mental health landscape in Uganda, from the violent history of colonial psychiatry throughout the 20th century to modern-day hospital settings.

2:25-2:50 pm EST

Mini Workshop: Intentional Peer Support

In this workshop, we will practice shifting the lens from the individual to the relationship, exploring possibilities in the context of connection and mutual exploration of how we come to know what we know.

Chris Hansen

A New Zealander by birth, Chris has 27 years involved in local, regional, national and international peer support and advocacy initiatives, and in mental health sector planning and politics from a lived experience perspective. Other roles have included clinical and management roles in mental health services (before being promoted to certified service-user status), leadership within NZ’s award-winning anti-discrimination campaign, research for the NZ Mental Health Commission, and involvement in the development of the NZ national mental health strategic plan and workforce development strategy. Chris was a member of the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations for the development of the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities... has served on the board of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and has played a key role in the development of a number of peer-run crisis alternatives. Chris Hansen is a Co-Director of Intentional Peer Support and has been co-teaching and developing Intentional Peer Support in the United States and in other countries with Co-Directors Shery Mead and now Lisa Archibald for the past 19 years. Read Full Bio

2:50-3:00 pm EST

Break

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Innovative Artists Interlude

3:00-3:15 pm EST

Issa Ibrahim

Issa is a visual artist, author, musician, and filmmaker born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. In 1990, at age 24, in a marijuana induced delusion, Ibrahim suffered an extreme psychotic meltdown culminating in a horrific family tragedy, leading him to spend almost 20 years in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Under the tutelage of Polish installation artist Bolek Greczynski, Ibrahim became a 30-year artist-in-residence at Creedmoor’s Living Museum, an art rehab program and artist's asylum. He has exhibited in many gallery and non-profit spaces in the greater New York area as well as group shows at Hofstra University, the Queens Museum of Art and in art spaces the world over. He and his work have also been featured in the HBO documentary, The Living Museum by Academy Award winning director, Jessica Yu. His memoir The Hospital Always Wins, published by Chicago Review Press, was the subject of an hour-long NPR audio story and won the 2014 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best News Documentary and the 2014 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Director’s Choice Award. Since getting released in 2009 Ibrahim has become a member artist represented by Fountain House Gallery; the premier New York City gallery dedicated to promoting the artwork of artists with mental health challenges. Issa Ibrahim vows to continue challenging preconceived and prejudicial ideas in society, combat stigma, expose the realities of our broken mental health system and explore how openness can aid in respecting psychiatric sufferers and survivors who are our fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, friends, neighbors, and ourselves. Read Full Bio

Issa will provide background on an artist's life in a mental institution to give us a surprising window into one of the most notorious aspects of our social responses to mental difference – the creation of asylums to confine those deemed “too other” to function in the normate world.

Sabrina Chap

Sabrnia is a Brooklyn-based songwriter, composer, and performer. She’s got classical piano skills, the ballad lyrics of Tom Waits, the onstage antics of Phyllis Diller, and the voice of a whiskey angel. Described as ‘Rousing!’ by the New Yorker, her sets are a ragtime stompin’ good time, full of laughs, heartbreaks, and just plain good songwriting. Chap is also the editor of the Lambda-nominated anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction (Seven Stories Press). She's lectured widely on the book, presenting at the Brooklyn Museum, colleges nationally and abroad, and featuring on KEXP. Other activist work includes Cliterature, Letters to the Revolution, and Audio Protest. She speaks on mental health, art, and gender nationally and internationally. Read Full Bio

How can the very same state of mind be pathologized in one place and celebrated in another? Sabrina will offer a powerful presentation of the importance of context for meaning-making, discussing her experiences onstage and in a psychiatrist’s office.

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Critical Scholars

Dominant approaches to mental health have been a powerful source of social critique for decades. The most well-known critique, antipsychiatry, was active in the 1960’s and 1970’s but has been largely marginalized today. The problems around mental health have not disappeared, however, and critiques of the mental health systems have not died. Contemporary critical scholars are helping us make transition from antipsychiatry to mad studies. Anti-psychiatry focused on the “myth” of mental illness, whereas mad studies focuses on democracy-driven critiques of sanist prejudice and abuse, the continued need for developing alternatives, and the social and cultural causes of human suffering and debility. Mainstream mental health systems too often legitimate the overuse and overselling of biotechnological and pharmaceutical approaches at the expense of personal, social/political, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, and ecosystem alternatives. Mad Studies scholarship uses interdisciplinary approaches to reverse this reductionism and to keep our bodies and minds together with our social, cultural, spiritual, and community lives and with the larger ecosystems in which we live.

3:15-4:05 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

Erica Fletcher

Erica is a qualitative researcher with a focus on peer work in U.S. public mental health systems. Her current research evaluates support groups and other community-based approaches to enhance wellbeing. Over a decade ago, she completed an ethnography of The Icarus Project... a radical mental health organization, as a part of her dissertation research. Since then, she has continued to center lived experience and community-based participatory research processes within her scholarship and activism. Read Full Bio

The time of mad studies scholarship has arrived. The result is a flowering of mad studies work from a range of theoretical perspectives and positions. Erica will survey this emerging scholarship and articulate some of its key themes, concerns, and tensions.

Lennard Davis

Lennard is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had also served as the department’s Head. In addition, he is a Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago... as well as a Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. Davis is the author of two works on the novel–Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia U. Press, 1983, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (Routledge, 1987, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and co-editor of Left Politics and the Literary Profession. Read Full Bio

The rise of mad studies scholarship is fueled in no small part by the efforts of disability studies scholars. Using a biocultural and disability studies perspective, Lennard will consider some of the many slips and slides from “obsession” in popular culture to “obsessive compulsive disorder” in manuals of psychopathology.

Estée Klar

Estée is a PhD, Critical Disability Studies from York University. She is also an artist/ director and collaborator at the neurodiverse co-Lab, Dis Assembly in Toronto, Canada. She collaborates with her non-speaking autistic son and other non-speakers on artistic projects that emphasize a pedagogy of relation. While their work on mental health is from a space of lived experience, their day job is as a practicing Canine and Feline behaviorist. Read Full Bio

Patty Douglas

Patty is an Associate Professor, inaugural Chair in Student Success and Wellness and Director of the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on rethinking deficit approaches to autism and neurodivergence using critical and creative approaches including disability studies, decolonial studies and arts-based and creative methodologies. Douglas founded and leads the Re•Storying Autism project, now in its 9th year (www.restoryingautism.com), a multimedia storytelling project in Canada, the UK and Aotearoa (New Zealand) that collaboratively reimagines autism and practice in education and health in ways that affirm and desire difference. As a white settler academic, Douglas is deeply committed to decolonizing research. She identifies as neurodivergent and invisibly disabled and is the mother of two sons, one of whom is autistic. She is also a former special education teacher in Ontario and B.C. Her monograph, Unmothering Autism: Ethical Disruptions and Affirming Care is in forthcoming with UBC Press in 2024. Read Full Bio

Patty and Estée will share about their experimental Fluxus artistic practice, which is underscored by a pedagogy of relation and values improvisational processes that reveal the techniques to support neurodiversity outside of the pathology paradigm.

4:05-4:30 pm EST

Mini Workshop: Mad Studies in Higher Education

This collaborative workshop will invite participants to think through how students and faculty engage with Mad Studies at the undergraduate level.

Hayley Stefan

Hayley is a Lecturer in the Montserrat Program and Department of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her work focuses on the relationship between disability and race in American contemporary, children’s, and young adult literature and media, and across the digital humanities. You can read her recent work in American Literature, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and Screen Bodies, and learn more about her pedagogy and research on her website: www.hayleystefan.org.

4:30-4:35 pm EST

Break

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4:35-4:40 pm EST

Book Giveaway

Towards the end of the event, we will raffle off 5 copies of the Mad Studies Reader!

Anyone who purchases tickets to the symposium will receive at least 1 raffle ticket, depending on their registration tier. Additional raffle tickets are $5 each, and can be purchased via IDHA’s donate page ($5 each, please indicate “raffle” in the donor note section). You will also have the opportunity to purchase tickets during the live event.

Mad Studies Reader:
Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health

Edited by Bradley Lewis, Alisha Ali, and Jazmine Russell

The Mad Studies Reader gathers voices from activists, artists, scholars, and clinicians who critically examine psychiatry, mental health care, and societal attitudes toward mental difference. With an emphasis on lived experience and issues of injustice in mental health, this collection champions anti-sanist approaches in scholarship, practice, art, and activism. Beyond providing a theoretical and historical framework, the Reader highlights perspectives from mad pride activists, humanities scholars, and critical clinicians who challenge conventional understandings of mental difference. These voices propose inclusive, anti-sanist frameworks that resist oppression and redefine who holds the power to interpret mental difference.

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Concerned Clinicians

The clinical world is far from a totality and dominant, normative, models of mental health, such as biopsychiatry and cognitive behaviorism, are a source of struggle within the clinical world. Mad studies-oriented clinicians are active in critiquing the limits, harms, and sanist risks of normative models. These clinicians create and develop alternatives that can provide lines of flight for those who need or prefer them. These alternatives open up ways of understanding and being with mental difference beyond pathologizing models and beyond broken brains, chemical imbalances, and cognitive distortions. These alternatives shift not only the clinical world but the larger social world where sanism contributes to a host of hierarchical dichotomies (such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, colonialism, anthropocentrism) that shape our normative and imperial cultures of inequality and unsustainability.

4:40-5:30 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

Noel Hunter

Noel is a clinical psychologist and advocate for the rights of those whose voices too often go unheard. She writes and teaches about the need for a truly trauma-informed and holistic perspective on what normally gets called “mental illness.” Her work has appeared in Truthout, Mad in America, and Alternet, and interviews have been featured in... HuffPost, Forbes, CNN, National Geographic, and BBC, among others. She is the author of the book Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services and is the founder/director of MindClear Integrative Psychotherapy. Read Full Bio

The mental health professions are largely predicated on the idea that there is a hard line between mental illness and wellness, and that the professionals are on the side of wellness. Noel will share from the perspective of a psychologist who went into the field after her experiences as a “seriously mentally ill” patient.

Marilyn Charles

Marilyn is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is committed to mentoring future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers. Research interests include creativity, reflective function and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Affiliations include Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Universidad de Monterrey; Harvard Medical School. Books include: Working with Trauma; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and The Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown). Forthcoming from APA Press: Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. Read Full Bio

Marilyn will provide a psychoanalytic perspective that goes beyond Freud’s early scientific and secular prejudice and dogmatism. She will show how innovative psychoanalytic approaches can be attuned to and supportive of experiences that can otherwise be personally overwhelming and socially ostracizing.

Jennifer Poole

Jennifer is a white settler from England and maddened community peer supporter. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University where her teaching, learning and re-search is focused on sanism(s), madness, grief, death and interrupting colonialism in pedagogy and methodology. She supports learners/students at multiple universities, is a co-lead editor for the International Mad Studies Journal and has deep experience in multiple ways of making and sharing knowledge. Read Full Bio

Stephanie LeBlanc

Stephanie is a maddened occupational therapist, caregiver, scholar and part-time faculty lecturer in the Disability Studies Department at King's University College in London, ON. Her research critically examines the ways lived experience is consumed within the context of health professional education programs... and her writing, learning, teaching, and practice have focused largely on the interruption of sanism and epistemic injustice in these spaces. Read Full Bio

Understanding and combating sanism is at the heart of mad studies. Jennifer and Stephanie will share many of the key uses of the term; the way that it has been picked up by clinicians, academics, and activists; and some of the key differences between “sanism” and “stigma.”

5:30-5:55 pm EST

Mini Workshop #1: The Revolution Will Not Be Pathologized

Through facilitated conversation and somatic practices influenced by a radical mindfulness ethic, Gitika will invite participants to dream of ways for therapists to become accomplices in global and transgenerational liberatory movements. Channeling the lessons from her own practice and the practices of colleagues in mental health, this workshop hopes to reinforce radical hope and envision ways to build a sustainable collective practice of resisting oppressive systems.

Gitika Talwar

Gitika is a Community Clinical Psychologist who is a first-generation Indian Immigrant in the U.S. With a mental health career spanning the nations of India and the colonized Turtle Island., Gitika identifies as a Steward of the mental health ecosystems of both nations. Gitika earned her PhD from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and is the Founder of Pranh Healing & Wellness, PLLC: a mental health organization on a mission to support people in harmonizing mind-body-spirit through individual and peer- communities grounded in decolonial, liberatory practices. As a first-generation immigrant, psychotherapist, and a bipartisan immigration activist, Gitika is reflective about the fluidity of borders and the historic (past/present) backdrop to the experience of migration.

Mini Workshop #2: Abolishing Forced Psychiatry As Clinical Best Practice

Forcing people into hospitals and onto drugs, and coercing them with threats in the community, is standard care for psychiatry internationally, despite violating the most basic self-determination principles of disability justice and human rights. Join a discussion of how abolishing force and embracing voluntary services is also best clinical practice for better treatment outcomes and more effective care — and how clinicians in force-based institutions can join the abolition movement, now. Start with a public declaration: I am a forced psychiatry abolitionist.

Will Hall

Will is a therapist and community development worker changing the social response to madness. A schizophrenia diagnosis survivor and longtime organizer with the psychiatric survivor movement, he is host of Madness Radio, co-founder of Freedom Center, co-founder of Portland Hearing Voices, co-founder of Hearing Voices Network USA, and past co-coordinator of The Icarus Project. Will has appeared in several documentary films including Crazywise, Healing Voices, and Coming off Psych Drugs; A Meeting of Minds, and his media appearances include the New York Times, Newsweek, Radio New Zealand, Radio Sarajevo, and The Guardian. Will has a certificate in Open Dialogue and a diploma in Jungian psychology, and his disability advocacy received the Judi Chamberlin Advocacy Award, the Portland Open Minds award, and the Stavros Center for Independent Living Disability Rights Award. He is the author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs and Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness (finalist for the finalist for the Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize for Nonfiction 2022), as well peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Research Ethics, and chapters in Modern Community Mental Health An Interdisciplinary Approach by Oxford University and The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality. He recently co-created Mad Camp, a summer camp for survivors. In an interview Will told the Portland Mercury weekly newspaper: "When I was growing up, I wanted to be a magician. Then I wanted to be a biologist, then I wanted to be a psychologist, then I wanted to be a community organizer, then I wanted to be a philosopher. Now I’m sort of all of them.” Read Full Bio

5:55-6:00 pm EST

Closing Remarks

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Continuing Education Credits

IDHA is pleased to offer the Mad Studies Symposium for Continuing Education (CE) credits!

5 CE credits for Psychologists, Social Workers, Counselors, and Therapists are available at the General or Supporter rate. License eligibility for this activity is more limited than usual for IDHA, so please be sure to view the CE details prior to registering.

In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by Amedco LLC and Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA). Amedco LLC is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team. Amedco Joint Accreditation #4008163.

As a training institute that values lived experience as highly as professional training, IDHA recognizes the way that the credentialing system enforces a culture of professionalism and devalues lived experience. At the same time, we believe it is a radical act to offer our programs for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Will the symposium be recorded?

Yes! The symposium event will be recorded and shared with registrants after the event. The only portions that may not be recorded in their entirety are the mini workshops, due to audience participation. Closed caption transcripts will be provided alongside the recordings.

I can’t afford to purchase a ticket. Can I still attend?

If you don’t see a ticket price that works for you, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org. We’d love to have you join us, and no one will be turned away due to a lack of funds.

Are Continuing Education (CE) credits available?

Yes! CEs are available to Psychologists, Social Workers, Counselors, and Therapists to those who register at the General or Supporter rate. Please note that license eligibility for this activity is more limited than usual for IDHA, so please be sure to view the CE details prior to registering.

How is IDHA approaching accessibility?

ASL interpretation will be provided for the duration of the symposium. IDHA also plans to use Zoom’s automated captions. Please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org with any other access-related questions or requests.

Will IDHA share materials and resources that are referenced throughout the event?

A list of resources and materials will be shared in a follow-up email to all who registered, along with the closed caption transcript and recording.

How can I get in touch with the symposium contributors?

We will share a list of ways to stay in contact with the event contributors in a follow-up email.

What is the relationship between this event and the Mad Studies Reader?

This event was planned in collaboration with the three co-editors of the Mad Studies Reader – Alisha Ali, Bradley Lewis, and Jazmine Russell – all of whom are also founding members of IDHA! The intention of this event is to celebrate the launch of this groundbreaking book, and the increasing solidarity around mad studies and allied fields.

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Schedule at-a-glance

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Pricing

What you get:

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Detailed Schedule

12:00-12:20 pm EST

IDHA Opening Remarks

Editor Opening Remarks

12:20-1:10 pm EST

Plenary Panel: What is Mad Studies?

1:10-1:20 pm EST

Break

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Innovative Artists Interlude

1:05-1:20 pm EST

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Daring Activists

1:35-2:25 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

2:25-2:50 pm EST

Mini Workshop: Intentional Peer Support

2:50-3:00 pm EST

Break

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Innovative Artists Interlude

3:00-3:15 pm EST

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Critical Scholars

3:15-4:05 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

4:05-4:30 pm EST

Mini Workshop: Mad Studies in Higher Education

4:30-4:35 pm EST

Break

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4:35-4:40 pm EST

Book Giveaway

Mad Studies Reader:Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health

Edited by Bradley Lewis, Alisha Ali, and Jazmine Russell

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Concerned Clinicians

4:40-5:30 pm EST

Readings and Presentations

5:30-5:55 pm EST

Mini Workshop #1: The Revolution Will Not Be Pathologized

Mini Workshop #2: Abolishing Forced Psychiatry As Clinical Best Practice

5:55-6:00 pm EST

Closing Remarks

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Continuing Education Credits

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Mad Studies Reader:
Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health