Series Overview
How do we find our way home to ourselves, our bodies, and our communities while colonialism continues to sever us from our lands, lineages, and ways of healing? Climate crises, ongoing pandemics, apartheid, genocide, war, and destabilization thrust more people into diaspora and disability, while services criminalize and pathologize any person or practice that visibilizes or resists the capitalist status quo of disconnection, displacement, and disaster. The very context for our fragmented minds, spirits, and communities has been as obscured by oppressive smoke as the horizon. The maps we’ve been given to traverse the territory of healing are riddled with imperial lines of division, separating us from histories and futures that would help us make meaning of our lived experiences. Our imaginations and intuitions have endured the same weathering the land has, reshaped by extraction and exploitation.
In this time of mass-witness and loss, mental health practitioners are expected to provide healing, often while invisibilizing the role of the system in perpetuating dis-ease. Many are responding to our collective disconnection by turning to medicines and practices not their own in attempt to compensate for the deficiencies of dominant approaches. Meanwhile, People of the Global Majority are vilified and policed for the same practices, grieving as their ways of life are co-opted. Mental health providers seeking to attune to and support those navigating generational and systemic traumas have a critical role to play in mitigating the impacts of colonization and structural discrimination within our provisions of care.
As we face this pivotal crossroads of crisis, what is our “true north” as the Global South, its diasporas, and Indigenous peoples are continually forced to the frontlines? How will we dismantle colonial barriers to accessing care without erasing vital cultural boundaries? How will we create healing spaces that acknowledge the maps to wholeness that live in our bodies, our memories, our storytelling, and our dreams? Perhaps we have no need for maps at all when the Earth, our non-human kin, and our ancestors whisper to us the way to go.
IDHA’s 2024 training series, Topographies of (Dis)Connection, seeks to repair and deepen connection within and between each other, our communities, and the Earth – uplifting healing approaches that align us on the path to liberation and the rematriation of community care. Over the course of 8 classes, we will re-member and recenter care that resists separation and displacement. We will resource care providers and community members with tangible skills to center agency, interconnectedness, and deep listening to those most impacted – unlearning practices embedded within our harmful systems and ourselves. Drawing on lessons from across many movements, spiritualities, and disciplines, we will slow down and attune to our instruments of discernment: practicing connection, aliveness, and inner resourcing.
“I appreciate the willingness to grow together in the space — the recognition that we all come with lives rich with experience, and we are capable of co-building the future as far away as possible from state and interpersonal violence, towards collective and community care.”
—IDHA training participant, CROSSROADS OF CRISIS
Schedule
Registration includes the 3-hour class session, an optional 90-minute discussion group one week after the live class, and access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health on Mighty Networks. This is our virtual learning community where you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other students and your faculty.
Recording: Please note that all main sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants, in case you aren’t able to show up live.
Accessibility: ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided for all main class sessions (not including the discussion groups).
Discussion Groups: This training series will integrate a series of optional discussion groups, one per class, to complement the main sessions taught by faculty. The aim of the discussion group sessions is to provide a lightly-facilitated space for participants to further explore topics and themes brought up in each class. Groups will be 90 minutes long, and take place on Zoom one week after each class on a Sunday afternoon from 12-1:30 pm EST. Participants will have the opportunity to help shape these spaces and submit questions/comments for consideration within each discussion group. The date/time for each discussion group is included below, alongside the date of the main class session.
Date and Time |
Course Title and Faculty |
|
|---|---|---|
| Sunday, January 14, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Uprooting the Lie of Separation: Trauma-Sensitive Survival Strategies
Langston Kahn and Selin Nurgün | ENROLL |
| Sunday, February 11, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Embodied Justice: Physiology of Body-Mind-Spirit
Chloe Calderon Chotrani and Gabes Torres | ENROLL |
| Sunday, March 10, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Grounding in Our Nature: Nurturing Relationships to Land and Liberation
Jude Clark and Lara Sheehi | ENROLL |
| Sunday, April 7, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Seeds of Kinship: Ancestral Knowledge and Cultural Stewardship
Rowen White and Michael Yellow Bird | ENROLL |
| Sunday, May 5, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Creating Refuge from Psychiatric Force: Holding Space for Imagination in Community
Joana Arcangel, Leah Harris, and Vic Welle | ENROLL |
| Sunday, June 2, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Ecologies of Disruption: Queering Our Capacity for Conflict
Leander Roth, Stas Schmiedt, and Brianna Suslovic | ENROLL |
| Sunday, July 7, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Unraveling Expertise: Knowledge and Power in Context (CANCELED)
Andre Henry and Foluke Taylor | |
| Sunday, August 4, 2024 12-3 pm EST |
Co-Dreaming Care through Ritual: Creative and Intuitive Possibilities (CANCELED)
Denise Shanté Brown and Ji-Youn Kim |
*Update as of July 1, 2024: IDHA is canceling the final two classes in the series, as well as the accompanying discussion groups.
If you are registered in the series, you should have received an email from IDHA on July 1, including refund information for paid registrants. If you did not receive this email or have any questions please email contact@idha-nyc.org.
Uprooting the Lie of Separation:
Trauma-Sensitive Survival Strategies
Sunday, January 14, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, January 21, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
As a result of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism, we are experiencing disconnection on an unprecedented scale. This can play out on multiple levels and in multiple arenas – as disconnection from nature, seasons, and ecological rhythms; from one’s own emotions, sensitivities, and body wisdom; and from the collective. Climate catastrophe is a significant manifestation of this, further unmooring our relationship to land and ritual. Meanwhile, more people are attuning to the “lie of separation,” challenging the belief that we are fundamentally disconnected from each other and the earth. As old stories become undone, people may find themselves stuck in the space between stories, manifesting in pain, grief, and an overall lack of meaning. As our hearts are softened by suffering, how can we attune to these deep wounds?
This class will focus on the role that colonialism has played in creating widespread and chronic disconnection, exploring helpful and non-helpful survival strategies from a trauma-informed nervous system lens. This includes honoring the wisdom of dissociation, which can help people cope with the weight of a world in crisis. Rooted in Indigenous wisdom traditions of the African diaspora and body-based deep liberation practices, faculty will contextualize human disconnection on several levels, unearthing our inherent interconnectedness as a way to open up more choice, possibility, and healing. Participants will learn strategies for uncovering physical and emotional pain in order to gain access to parts of the self that previously were inaccessible, gain new perspectives, and usher in radical transformation.
Learning objectives:
Define the “lie of separation,” and apply it to mental health practice contexts
Specify the function of different survival strategies (e.g. fight, flight, freeze, dissociate)
Review how traumatic experiences, internalized oppression, and habitual emotional patterns rooted in old beliefs can hold people back from transformation
Review strategies to cultivate deep grounding, skillful boundaries, and how to resource our healing through tending relationship with the land where we are
Identify practices to settle the nervous system in order to effectively tend to personal and collective well-being in community
Langston Kahn is a liberation artist and community weaver specializing in radical transformation, ancestral healing and the restoration of an authentic relationship with our emotions. He stands at the crossroads, his practice guided by somatic modalities, contemporary shamanic traditions, initiations into traditions of the African Diaspora and his helping spirits and ancestors weaving it all together. He is a co-leader of the Cycle Community, a collective of people striving to live in alignment with ancient animist principles and applying them in service of personal and collective liberation. He is the author of Deep Liberation: Shamanic Teachings for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma.
Selin Nurgün (they/she) is a somatic coach, educator, and bodyworker working at the intersection of embodiment, anti-oppression, and climate resilience based in Asheville, NC. They hold the significance of body-centered transformation as key to collective healing and liberation. In her practice she supports people to partner with their bodies in order to show up in the world with dignity, power, and in alignment with what they care most about. She holds a Master's of Science degree in Environmental Behavior, Education and Communication, with a focus on the psychological dimensions of climate change. Their commitment to centering underserved and vulnerable communities has led them to explore non-western, non-institutional, anti-carceral, trauma-sensitive healing approaches that break down barriers to care.
Embodied Justice:
Physiology of Body-Mind-Spirit
Sunday, February 11, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, February 18, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
Western healing systems are rooted in the practice of examining and analyzing body systems independently from one another in order to identify a supposed “problem” and “solution.” As capitalist-colonial systems have cultured parts of our embodiment, there is a need to counter dualistic narratives and co-process Cartesian impacts and Gnosticism. In truth, our psychobiological formation, neural architecture, and survival are wholly dependent on restoring the quality of connection – to ourselves, each other, the land, the universe, our ancestors, and the web of life around us. Thus, the disconnection between mind, body, and spirit constitutes a form of violence, failing to account for the myriad ways that these interact. Disconnections can introduce emotional and energetic reverberations of fear, anxiety, dysregulation and dissociation, which are then communicated physiologically as inflammation, pain, and other forms of chronic illness and dis-ease . Interconnectedness must be honored in order to chart paths towards justice, genuine healing and ease.
This class will explore the impact of capitalistic-colonial conditioning on our individual and collective bodies, drawing attention to the ways function over being is prioritized and that our current approaches function to keep systems invisible. What if we viewed ourselves through the lens of the social, political, systemic context of our lives? If we have been dis-membered by systems of colonization, how can we re-member and put ourselves back together? What movements and practices can we turn to grieve violence and loss and realize integration? Faculty will discuss the ways in which each body-mind-spirit is connected to expansive histories, continuously transmitting wisdom of where it has been and where it is. Participants will be encouraged to see themselves as artists of connection, and gain new strategies to identify and tend to body-mind-spirit needs during times of meta-crisis.
Learning objectives:
Locate the institutions and power structures that contribute to mind-body-spirit disconnection, and the social movements and healing practices that can aid integration
Review examples of body-mind-spirit experiences that demonstrate the interdependent nature of our bodies, honor the complexities of different abilities (e.g. neurodivergence, inflammation), and acknowledge capitalist-colonial conditions themselves can be disabling
Demonstrate the power of collectivist, ancestral, and spiritual approaches to healing, including how they can support meaning making, self-understanding, and animistic sensibilities towards justice
Identify trauma-informed and justice-oriented ways that providers can support people and communities in their unique healing journey
Review on-the-ground perspectives from the Global Southeast (specifically in the context of the Philippines) to build bridges with Western contexts of justice-oriented education
Chloe Calderon Chotrani responds to the meta-crisis by advocating for ancestral ancient animistic practices; as an embodiment facilitator, somatic therapist, movement artist, and a lover of land. Drawing upon mature experience in world movement arts, complementary medical health, trauma sensitive facilitation, bodywork modalities, and earth-based wisdom. Her work is rooted in deconditioning colonialism and capitalism by prioritizing a politics of care, and working with and within the Global South. Chloe grew up with selective mutism - offering her kinaesthetic intelligence, honing on her gift of interpreting the unspoken stories of the body. Chloe comes from Pakistani, Filipina, and Singaporean ancestral lines.
Gabes Torres (she/they/siya) is a mental health practitioner, organizer, and journalist. Her work focuses on the intersection of international solidarity and collective healing, and is mainly organizing and coordinating a peer support network for human rights defenders and activists in the global South. Gabes writes stories on mental health and social change movements. Most of her work is found on Yes! Magazine, an independent publisher of solutions journalism.
Grounding in Our Nature:
Nurturing Relationships to Land and Liberation
Sunday, March 10, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, March 17, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
In a period of rapid displacement from climate change, resource extraction, gentrification and genocide, mental health systems have responded by pathologizing grief and distress rather than the oppressive conditions that create them. Although a growing body of literature recognizes the healing effects of connecting to nature, most studies bypass the reality that, for those mourning the most, access to land is often contested, policed and poisoned by racist state violence, occupation and war. How can we access and build true transformative care while our communities are constantly being disrupted and displaced? How do we align ourselves as care providers and community members onto the path to liberation and rematriation of care while the land and its caretakers are not yet free and sovereign?
This class will provide historical and present-day perspectives on the possibilities and limitations of re-membering and reclaiming connection to land and nature. From Turtle Island to Palestine, South Africa to Indonesia, we will explore practices that honor resistance to, and healing through, conditions as devastating as apartheid and ethnic cleansing. As both providers and individuals with lived experience, faculty will provide examples of nurturing indigenous guardianship of land, community and place through psychospiritual connection and ritual. Participants will be invited into gentle memory work and engagement with truly decolonial trauma work grounded in the liberation psychology of Frantz Fanon and his successors.
Learning objectives:
Identify the interrelated ecological and mental health impacts of events such as climate catastrophe and war
Review examples of land-based healing that honor and can help remedy the widespread discrimination, oppression, and inequity present in the current mental health system
Demonstrate the power of healing practices that uplift the connections between people, communities, land, and earth
Apply the theory and principles of liberation psychology to current practice
Jude Clark is a 53 year old Black South African woman, an independent practitioner within the social justice arena. She is a clinical psychologist and feminist with expertise in the area of trauma, gender and group process. She was an academic for 14 years and also has 25 years of experience in facilitating group processes on issues of transformation, anti-racism, diversity, inclusion and healing across various domains. She accompanies courageous conversations, particularly around justice, equity, wellness and well-being. She is deeply invested in the experience of being Black in the world and what a decolonised collective healing process might look like, particularly within activist and movement spaces.
Lara Sheehi (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.
Seeds of Kinship:
Ancestral Knowledge and Cultural Stewardship
Sunday, April 7, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, APril 14, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
Not one of us is untouched by the diaspora of grief and disconnection created by colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and climate crisis. Our collective wellbeing is shaped by this ongoing structural violence, which has infiltrated our bodies and minds, our relationships, our food and soil, and our teaching and healing spaces – leading to compromised physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Many of us long for care and community within the fractured world we have inherited, but find that the systems and structures purported to support these desires do not provide the nourishment we deserve.
This class will uplift practices that strengthen our inner resourcing, deepen mutuality, and center intergenerational brilliance. How can we seed ways of being that are grounded in connection to our more than human kin, ancestral relationships, and one another? How can a return to the stories, prayers, and food of our lineages open new possibilities for collective liberation? What are the conditions needed to grow justice in our healing communities? Faculty will share ancestral Indigenous practices rooted in interdependence and resistance that invite embodied connection to land and lineage as foundations for personal and collective healing.
Learning objectives:
Identify connections between seed keeping, food justice, and transformative mental health
Review the framework of neurodecolonization, combining mindfulness approaches with secular and sacred contemplative practices
Identify rematriation practices that can support personal and collective healing
Practice story-centered, trauma-informed, and community-building strategies that center kinship and ancestral knowledge
Rowen White is an Indigenous Seed Keeper from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the Director of Sierra Seeds, an innovative organic seed organization focusing on Indigenous seed stewardship and education. Rowen is the founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network, which is committed to restoring the Indigenous Seed Commons across North America through restoring seed kinship routes. She is guided in layers of praxis of cultivating intercultural collaborations to seed a more equitable, relational, kincentric food landscape that centers a deep sense of belonging and connection.
Michael Yellow Bird is Dean and Professor of the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Manitoba. He is an enrolled member of the MHA Nation (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) in North Dakota, USA. His research focuses on the effects of colonization and methods of decolonization, ancestral health, intermittent fasting, Indigenous mindfulness, neurodecolonization, mindful decolonization, and the cultural significance of Rez dogs. He is the founder, director, and principal investigator of The Centre for Mindful Decolonization and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. He serves as a consultant, trainer, and senior advisor to several BIPOC mindfulness groups and organizations who are seeking to incorporate mindfulness practices, philosophies, and activities to Indigenize and decolonize western mindfulness approaches in order to address systemic racism and engage in structural change.
Creating Refuge from Psychiatric Force:
Holding Space for Imagination in Community
Sunday, May 5, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday May 12, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
As our wider society experiences a crisis of connection, similar dynamics are evident in a mental health system that often perpetuates isolation through practices of policing, coercion, and control. Right now, we are witnessing a trend of expanding involuntary psychiatric detention, culminating in a human rights crisis that denies people self-determination. Rooting in history, it’s critical to remember that the asylum is a colonial institution, designed to pathologize and isolate anyone perceived to disrupt or deviate from the social order. As Indigenous healing traditions continue to be erased and co-opted, and mental health policy and practice increasingly follow carceral logics, how can providers and advocates practice deep listening, celebrate creativity, and embody approaches that meet the needs of individuals and collectives?
This class will explore how we can remake care by changing systems, rather than allowing systems to change us – creating refuge from practices rooted in individualism and knowledge hierarchy. Drawing on examples from peer support and peer-run respite advocacy, it will present a radical analysis to working in systems that can override trust in self and community knowledge. Honoring more expansive forms of meaning making that are older than psychiatry – including the realms of imagination and metaphor – faculty will hold space for the entire ecology surrounding grief, distress, suicidality, and potentially transformative states. With these approaches in mind and centering the wisdom of psych survivorship, we hope to foster shared understanding, encourage intuitive guidance and keep the human spirit alive.
Learning objectives:
Identify the impacts of psychiatric coercion on personal agency and long-term healing
Define key values and lessons from peer support and peer-run respite advocacy
Demonstrate the importance of “meaning making” as central to upholding autonomy, interrogating the power of the psychiatric lens
Review examples of systems changing us instead of us changing systems to help participant create future action plans
Identify practices and strategies to protect the agency of people navigating the mental health system, moving toward freedom, justice, and choice-based support
Joana Arcangel is a parent, writer, artist, and consultant. She emigrated from the Philippines to the United States at the age of eight and speaks Tagalog fluently. She values finding ways to explore and honor neurodiversity, creativity, and resiliency. Her career journey includes previously managing a peer-run respite home in California. Joana is a Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® Certified Teacher, and Master Facilitator of Core Gift Discovery.
Vic Welle is an activist, psychiatric survivor, and peer support trainer. Vic is co-founder of Monarch House Peer Run Respite in Wisconsin and an advocate for non-carceral, community based crisis supports.
Leah Harris is a psychiatric survivor, activist, and independent journalist. Their work examines mental health and disability policy, with a focus on deinstitutionalization and involuntary psychiatric intervention. Leah's writing appears in Truthout, the Disability Visibility Project, The Progressive, and Mad in America; and in the anthologies We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health (North Atlantic Books) and the forthcoming Mad Studies Reader (Routledge). Their forthcoming book NONCOMPLIANT traces two generations of psychiatric survivorship and resistance in their family, alongside in-depth reporting on America's failed mental health policies and movements for psych abolition.
Ecologies of Disruption:
Queering Our Capacity for Conflict
Sunday, June 2, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, June 9, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
All of our relational encounters are shaped by complex power dynamics and our ability to be present with ourselves and others simultaneously. Conflict is an inevitability, making it critical to build the capacity to engage with it. For those working to disrupt how “care” is provided, we must attune to the ways in which mainstream practice has been shaped by systems of oppression. Our nervous system responses to disruption also mirror the colonial structures we seek to dismantle, eliciting defensiveness, paternalism, and separation from self or the othered. What does it look and feel like to practice resourcing our bodyminds and spirits in conflict? What can the wisdom of the body in conflict with social norms teach us about moving through conflict with greater fluidity and creativity? How can care providers create containers that honor the liberatory potential of rupture?
This class will invite participants to question and queer their current approaches to conflict within care and community contexts. Through contemplative methods of witnessing our interconnectedness to others, we will ground in our desires, depths and discomforts within conflict. Together we will attune to the expansiveness of radical world-making, reframing discomfort as a tool for building greater awareness, pleasure and play. Faculty will offer rituals and reflections to support us in resourcing our ecosystems of healing and making more embodied space for discomfort. Participants will cultivate skills for engaging with conflict in ways that hold space for mystery, mess, and mending.
Learning objectives:
Specify how dominant approaches to conflict uphold systems of oppression
Demonstrate the ways in which conflict holds potential for deepening insight and interconnectedness
Identify how spiritual perspectives can illuminate the language of violence within conflict
Review body-based practices that make it more possible to be present to discomfort, harm, and rupture
Leander Roth (they/he) is Spring Up’s mythematician and co-founder. He lives on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne unceded lands in Denver, CO. Leander is a systems thinker and conflict strategist who enjoys supporting organizations in building shared power and decentralization. They are the co-author of Getting Free Together and the cofacilitator of bluelight.academy’s Getting Free Together consulting program. Leander is a European-American (white) transmasculine settler committed to learning and unlearning in the service of collective liberation. They support clients through deep listening, asking questions, and supporting them in getting unstuck and finding clarity and a path forward.
Stas Schmiedt (they/them) is a Queer, Nonbinary, Black-Italian based on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne unceded lands in Denver, CO. In addition to being a Co-Founder of Spring Up and bluelight.academy, Stas is also our “Imaginatrix” and Lead Curriculum Designer. Their interwoven backgrounds in conflict intervention, speculative fiction writing, transformative and restorative justice, cooperative governance, as well as abolitionist and anti-violence organizing make them a dynamic and adaptive leader, speaker, and facilitator. Stas supports clients in untangling the patterns and root causes of challenges they face through storytelling, power analysis, and creative or spiritual practices. They love to connect people to resources that mirror their experiences, illuminate another lens, and/or give a tangible framework to craft a path forward.
Brianna Suslovic is a Ph.D. candidate in social work at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School. She is a 2018 graduate of Smith's M.S.W. program and she also has a bachelor's degree from Harvard College. Suslovic studies social work, prisons, jails, courts, and policing. She organizes with Social Work for Palestine and the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work, and she works with Spring Up to create opportunities for training and co-learning on conflict, harm, and transformation. In her spare time, she teaches in Illinois jails and prisons, facilitates yoga classes in her neighborhood and teaches social work students at UChicago.
*Isa Frank and Atlas Tan were originally listed as faculty for this session. In alignment with the title and topic, IDHA is practicing emergence and adaptability as this class has shifted to have new faculty who will be presenting on a similar topic. Isa and Atlas are co-creators of the session’s themes, and the IDHA team thanks them immensely for their contributions.
Unraveling Expertise:
Knowledge and Power in Context
*Update as of July 1, 2024: IDHA is canceling this class and the accompanying discussion group. If you are registered for the class, you should have received an email from IDHA on July 1, including refund information for paid registrants. If you did not receive this email or have any questions, please email contact@idha-nyc.org.
Sunday, July 7, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, July 14 • 12-1:30 PM EST
Where do we know from? This question, posed by professor and writer Dr. Katherine McKittrick, is a way to simultaneously locate ourselves and unravel the academic intellectual authority that shapes so much of our life and work. The current mental health system heavily values some forms of knowledge and meaning-making over others, prioritizing degreed professionalism and research at the expense of lived and embodied wisdom. This reliance on such a fixed definition of “expertise,” as well as biased notions of what is considered “evidence-based,” culminate in widespread ableism and sanism within the field and have dire consequences for care. In order to realize a more justice-oriented future, we must deeply explore what knowledge is, how its hierarchies play out, and how they can be interrupted.
This class will challenge traditional conceptions of “expertise” and “knowledge” within mental health, emphasizing the power of experiential wisdom for our personal and professional journeys. Where do you know from? Who are you learning from? How do you use that knowledge? Faculty will share relevant shortcomings of the mental health system, provide strategies to break the mold of what currently constitutes expertise, and share resources to facilitate personal and collective processes of meaning-making. In turn, we will make room for unknown territories, including the act of holding space for another’s experience, or organizing to co-create futures of transformation. Participants will leave with new strategies to help navigate the confinements of modern society and embrace more diverse ways of knowing.
Learning objectives:
Distinguish lived experience as a valid epistemology, centering the inherent wisdom that people already possess
Analyze processes that credit and discredit knowledge through the lenses of sanism and ableism
Identify the ways in which fixed forms of knowledge can limit therapeutic, creative, and transformational processes
Identify how injustices of expertise play out in the mental health system based on power dynamics between professional knowledge and lived experience
Broaden personal concepts of meaning and expertise, to be adapted to the participant’s individual context
Andre Henry is a bestselling author, award-winning musician, and activist based in Los Angeles.
Foluke Taylor is a therapist*writer practising with an asterisk* to signal black feminist modes of care, space-making, refusal, and reimagining. Her research focuses on creative practices of writing and reading, their knowledge-producing potential and therapeutic possibilities. Foluke lived in The Gambia for over ten years (doing some adult growing up) before returning to London where she was born and lives currently. Her most recent book, Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, is published by W.W. Norton in New York and London.
Co-Dreaming Care through Ritual:
Creative and Intuitive Possibilities
*Update as of July 1, 2024: IDHA is canceling this class and the accompanying discussion group. If you are registered for the class, you should have received an email from IDHA on July 1, including refund information for paid registrants. If you did not receive this email or have any questions, please email contact@idha-nyc.org.
Sunday, August 4, 2024 • 12-3 pm EST
optional discussion group: Sunday, August 11, 2024 • 12-1:30 PM EST
As the pervasiveness of colonialism comes to the forefront of our consciousness, we are faced with the opportunity to alchemize our shared pain, grief, and rage into new avenues for individual and collective healing. The impacts of oppressive systems manifest as mental health challenges, health and economic disparities, complex trauma, poverty, housing insecurity, and more. Such nuanced experiences warrant nuanced solutions that transcend existing medical and social service systems – which all too often pathologize and criminalize the very valid reactions to trauma and violence. More than ever, we need liberatory approaches to care that stretch beyond the limitations of individualized and institutionalized wellness, center the power of healing in relationship, and embody the power of collective and ancestral wisdom.
This last class will invite participants to dream new ethics and practices of care, with the intention of co-creating futures that nourish relationships and creativity. Grounded in radical imagination and with a shared vision for collective liberation, faculty will guide moments of activating possibility to design and move towards the worlds we long to create. Through somatic reflection, storytelling, and ritual, participants will be invited to expand their intuitive wisdoms, and plant seeds for different care and relating practices for themselves and their communities.
Learning objectives:
Locate the tensions between the boundedness of the “ethics” and rules of the mental health/wellness industry
Engage personal and collective desires and longings towards more creative possibilities in care-oriented, communal relating
Practice envisioning what care could look or feel like beyond professionalized roles, in recognition of wisdoms and responsibilities rooted in various identities, social power, community roles, and ancestral lineages
Create rituals that deepen our relationships to care, solidarity, and intimacy in order to shape a more embodied, spirited praxis
Denise Shanté Brown (she/her) is a holistic design strategist, creative co-conspirator and intuitive writer. She designs liberatory experiences where people can nurture their dreams for care, healing and justice into existence. With over 10 years of creative social practice and visionary rigor, she guides the process of transformation across movements and is devoted to (re)imagining ways to build, write, and embody the lives we long for. Known for being a facilitator of the magical and meaningful, she’s also a published writer of words, previous Steering Committee Member and current Care Pod Lead with the Design Justice Network, Weaver at the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry, and the Founding Director of Black Womxn Flourish.
Ji-Youn Kim (they/she) is a queer, currently non-disabled Corean immigrant and settler, joy-seeker, liberatory dreamer, psych survivor, justice-oriented therapist ish, and ongoing creation of community, based in what is colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. They work in private/alternative practice in relationships with predominantly Sick & Disabled QTBIPOC client community members with the orientation of therapy-ish as a space to practice embodied liberatory practices in the spirit of collective liberation. Her therapeutic work and political praxis are shaped by Indigenous sovereignty, queer Black feminism, abolition, Transformative Justice, and Disability Justice.
“The instructors were clearly knowledgeable and passionate about their work. As someone who works within the mental health system, I found it so helpful and validating to discuss how to navigate being within the system while being an effective disrupter.”
—IDHA training participant, Crossroads of Crisis
Pricing Tiers
What you get: |
Reduced/Member $25/ class |
General $55/ class |
Supporter $79/ class |
| 3-hour live class session | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Class recording and resource list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Supplemental facilitated discussion group | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access to IDHA's virtual learning community on Mighty Networks | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complementary CE credits (2.75 per class) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Subsidize another participant and sustain IDHA's ongoing training program | ✓ |
Bundle Pricing
Save more than 30% when you purchase all EIGHT courses in the series!
|
Reduced/Member $200 $135/ 8 classes |
General $440 $300/ 8 classes |
Supporter $640 $440/ 8 classes |
Scholarships
We are also offering full and partial scholarships to the entire series. Our Scholarship Program is for mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority.
Deadline to apply: December 27
Continuing Education Credits
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 training content for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.
For this 2024 series, all eight sessions are eligible for CE credits. CE credits are available toavailable to psychologists, social workers, counselors, therapists, and medical doctors.
IDHA offers these CE credits (2.75 credits per class, or 22 for the full series) at the General and Supporter Rate only, for no additional cost. Certificates are made available after the class is over.
FAQ
What’s unique about IDHA’s approach?
We value lived experience as highly as professional training, so each course will be led by both a mental health clinician as well as someone who identifies as a survivor, a mental health service user, and/or someone who has experienced a mental health crisis. This will ensure participants receive holistic and nuanced perspectives.
Who is this series for?
This course is for mental health professionals, including but not limited to: clinicians, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, peer specialists, recovery support specialists, housing specialists, nurse practitioners and medical professionals, students. and anyone who works or plans to work with and around people who experience mental health-related issues.
Where are the classes held?
Classes will be held virtually via Zoom. Be sure to download the Zoom software onto your computer in advance of the training!
Are scholarships available?
IDHA will award a set of full and partial scholarship positions to mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority. Learn more about our Scholarship Program here (applications due December 27).
Are these classes accessible?
Live ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided for all eight class sessions.
Do I have to show up right at the time advertised for the class?
Yes, this is a live training so please be sure you are available at that time. All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after. Please note that all sessions begin at 12pm EST.
Will I have the opportunity to interact with faculty?
Yes, each live training will provide the opportunity to interact with the faculty. You can also interact with many faculty members on Mighty Networks.
What is your cancellation policy?
For any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.