Course Library Intro

This library offers a range of self-paced courses covering a wide range of essential topics in transformative mental health. Courses are designed to integrate tools and knowledge into your practice and daily life.

Most courses were adapted from former live, virtual offerings.

Audience

These courses are open to:

Mental health practitioners and care workers of all kinds
Academics and researchers
Educators
Artists and writers
Activists and movement leaders
Community organizers
Family members
Students

Platform

All courses are hosted on Mighty Networks, home to IDHA's School for Transformative Mental Health. This virtual community space supports sustained learning, engagement with other students, and access to supplemental resources.

Format

All courses are virtual and self-paced. Courses consist of short video lessons, supplemented by reflection questions and resources. All video lessons are equipped with human-reviewed closed captions.

Length

Courses range from 1-3 hours in length.

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All Available for CE Credit New Free Bundles

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Course Library

This course critically examines the shortcomings of the biopsychiatric model in mental health, explores alternative frameworks, and highlights the importance of lived experience in shaping more effective and humane mental health practices.

Rethinking Mental Health History of the Movement & Alternatives to Biomedical Approaches

This course explores the role of trauma in mental health and how psychological distress often arises from adverse experiences. It offers practical, trauma-informed tools, examines peer-led services, and describes models of post-traumatic growth for holistic healing.

Trauma, Growth & Resilience Redefining Trauma-Informed Practice

This course explores creative, non-medical approaches to understanding and describing mental health experiences, offering new language, frameworks, and tools such as Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) to support personal and community care.

Dangerous Gifts Beyond Symptom & Cure Mentality

This course examines the intersection of mental health and systemic oppression, exploring how historical and ongoing systems of oppression impact marginalized communities. It also emphasizes the importance of an intersectional approach to healing and mental health activism.

Our Struggles are Intertwined Intersections of Mental Health & Oppression

This course offers non-pathologizing frameworks for understanding altered states, introducing tools to support individuals navigating these experiences. It emphasizes the potential for personal and spiritual growth that these states can offer, transcending medicalized understandings of "psychosis."

Spiritually Transformative Experiences Emergence, Meaning Making & Growth

This course explores the Hearing Voices Movement, offering tools and strategies to support those who hear voices while challenging stigmatizing labels and promoting non-medical approaches to improve quality of life.

Supporting Those Who Hear Voices A Roadmap for Experts by Experience & Experts by Training

This course explores the transformative power of grief, offering somatic practice and rituals that help process collective and intergenerational trauma while challenging Western frameworks that disconnect us from our natural human responses to loss and violence.

Grounding in Grief Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual

This course explores how to decolonize mental health by integrating and honoring Indigenous practices and ancestral wisdom. It offers alternative healing approaches that connect us to our lineage and promote collective care and liberation.

Ancestral Healing Honoring Origins to Form Sacred Futures

This course explores restorative and transformative justice practices, offering strategies to create meaningful change in mental health and community work by moving away from punishment-centered paradigms and fostering accountable, healing-centered, and compassionate care systems.

Transcending the Punishment Paradigm The Promise of Restorative & Transformative Practices

This course explores the healing and liberatory potential of art-making in mental health, offering practical tools for using creativity to foster community, connection, and new ways of knowing within and beyond clinical settings.

Liberatory Art-Making Reimagining Community Care

This course explores the concept of "making sanctuary," inviting participants to transform individual and collective wounds into sites of creative inquiry. Rooted in a decolonial analysis, it encourages the decentering of fixed solutions in mental health.

Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice Putting Wounds to Work

This course examines the impact of colonialism and capitalism on marginalized communities, exploring how these systems affect mental health and well-being. It also introduces liberatory practices that foster inclusivity, mutuality, and new ways of being in community.

Equalizing Power Mental Health and the Creation of the Common

This course offers strategies to cultivate trust, intimacy, and consent in personal and collective relationships, and provides tools for accountability, conflict navigation, and building connections that endure across virtual and in-person contexts.

Nourishing Relationships Trust, Intimacy and Consent

This course examines the impact of Western individualism on relationships and mental health, introducing embodiment practices and collective strategies to cultivate a deeper sense of belonging and safety in our communities.

Centered Belonging Creating Space for Embodied Connection

This course examines how to navigate disagreement and conflict within diverse communities. It introduces practical tools for building empathy, understanding power dynamics, and fostering connection through generative conflict to support collective liberation.

Holding Difference Moving Toward Liberatory Futures Through Conflict

This course examines the current state of crisis care, including the impact of the rollout of 988 (the National Suicide Prevention Hotline) while exploring strategies to navigate the crisis care system, protect against coercion, and build community support and healing justice.

The Crisis Industry How Capitalism, Cops, and Coercion Shape Care Today

This course examines harmful mindsets rooted in white supremacy that show up dominant mental health crisis responses, offering alternative approaches and peer support tools to foster compassionate, collaborative care and dismantle power dynamics in crisis situations.

Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice Visions for a Liberated Crisis Response

This course examines culturally grounded mental health practices, focusing on Bapu Trust in India and Sawubona Healing Circles in the United States. It provides strategies to integrate survivor-centered approaches to promote inclusion, autonomy, and community care in other settings.

Global Grassroots Responses Weaving Together Healing and Social Justice

This course explores alternative mental health practices that prioritize autonomy and dignity, discussing care approaches like peer support, respite centers, and warmlines to provide more affirming and supportive crisis care while minimizing harm.

Alternative Care Approaches Honoring Authenticity and Vulnerable Expression

This course explores how to build community capacity for crisis prevention and intervention, emphasizing collective care, mutual aid, and non-carceral alternatives that prioritize self-determination, healing, and compassion.

Building Communities to Meet Crisis Resourcing Our Relationships

This course showcases two innovative programs responding to mental health crises in ways that center community needs and divest from carceral systems. It reminds us of the expertise we all carry, and the power of lived experience.

Paradigm Shifters Transformative Programs Redefining Crisis Care

This class examines the tension between professional ethics and personal values in mental health work, exploring how to practice value-driven crisis care. Participants will be invited to reflect on self-preservation rituals and gain skills to help navigate rigid work environments.

Creating a Crisis Toolkit Reconciling Personal Values with Professional Ethics

This course reimagines crisis as an opportunity for reflection and transformation, exploring inherited notions of crisis and ways to shift from reaction to resourcing. Participants will reflect on what needs to be unearthed, composted, and reimagined in their lives and communities.

Re-Orienting to Emergency A Slower Urgency

This course reimagines crisis response by centering the wisdom of those with lived experience. Participants will explore how peer support and community care can transform approaches to trauma and distress, gaining strategies to build awareness, empathy, and action.

Embodied Wisdom A Live Experience Showcase

Course Bundles

Crossroads of Crisis Bundle

The Crisis Industry

Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice

Alternative Care Approaches

Building Communities to Meet Crisis

Paradigm Shifters

Creating a Crisis Toolkit

Re-Orienting to Emergency

Embodied Wisdom

Originally offered live from Fall 2022-Spring 2023, the Crossroads of Crisis training series reimagines the crisis continuum – interrogating what crisis is, where it comes from, how to respond to it with curiosity and compassion, and the role of peers, providers, and communities. Building on former IDHA offerings Crisis as Catalyst and Cultivating Community, its learning is grounded in the voices of lived experience and approach the theme of crisis from multiple lenses and dimensions. Drawing inspiration and lessons from current community-based efforts, it provides the opportunity practice how to disrupt paradigms of coercion, create personal codes of ethics, and attune to the needs of those we support in professional and nonprofessional roles.

Purchase - General ($120) Purchase - Supporter ($240)

Cultivating Community Bundle

Equalizing Power

Nourishing Relationship

Centered Belonging

Holding Difference

Originally offered live in Spring 2022, the Cultivating Community training series sought to shine a light on the essential role of community, connection, and relationship in building care systems that center collective liberation. We explored how we can create the conditions for community in a range of diverse settings; discuss community as a form of resistance to oppression; and introduce concrete approaches, tools, and strategies to foster community care in and outside of the formal mental health system.

Purchase - General ($60) Purchase - Supporter ($120)

Course Bundle Section

Crisis as Catalyst Bundle

Grounding in Grief

Ancestral Healing

Transcending the Punishment Paradigm

Liberatory Art-Making

Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice

Originally offered live in Fall 2021, the Crisis as Catalyst training series resists calls to return to normal in a supposed post-pandemic world, and invites us to instead center a vision of radical transformation: moving from healing or fixing what is broken to cultivating what could be. This process requires grieving the extraordinary losses we have faced over the last year and across generations; challenging assumptions and occupying liminal spaces; and sitting with our pain and exhaustion as a means to grasp problems firmly at the root. It requires honoring ancestral and Indigenous ways of knowing, rectifying harm, and inviting people to cultivate radical joy to usher in a future shaped by ecological, economic, racial, and healing justice. We introduced an array of healing strategies proliferated by world weavers past and present, as well as practical opportunities to apply knowledge and experiences to our lives and work.

Purchase - General ($75) Purchase - Supporter ($150)

IDHA Self-Paced Course Library