Narrative Healing: Reclaiming Your Story & the Power of Cross-Movement Organizing in Mental Health with Jessie Roth

It takes courage to own your story, especially for trauma survivors. Jessie Roth shows us, in this episode, the power of storytelling, showing up as your full self with the multiple roles and identities you hold and why it’s important to intentionally straddle frameworks to re-story your experiences as a form of healing. As the director of The Institute for the Development of Human Arts, she’s also a master at facilitating cross-movement knowledge building at the intersections of mental health and social justice.

“We can dream bigger than just being a “voice for the voiceless.” What are the systems and structures that exist and are keeping people from having a voice or are creating hierarchies of knowledge? This person has a more trusted or “valid” voice than another maybe because they have a certain degree, or somebody else has a diagnosis that has caused them to be not trusted as the expert of their own experience.”

— Jessie Roth, Depth Work Podcast Episode 27

What you’ll learn in this episode:

how to advocate as a family member of someone with mental health concerns
why “being a voice for the voiceless” gets a lot wrong about autonomy and decision-making in mental health
what it means to “decarcerate mental health care” and why it’s crucial
how to build power within and across multiple movements for liberation

“There are many, many forms of confinement and incarceration. That analysis doesn’t create hierarchies between them, it’s simply deepening the analysis around abolition specifically to include psych wards and all forms of involuntary commitment… For whatever reason, and there is a reason, it’s called “sanism,” a lot of people can get behind the idea that we should abolish prisons and other forms of confinement and punishment, but don’t see psych wards or mental health institutions as exactly that.”

— Jessie Roth, Depth Work Podcast Episode 27

About Jessie Roth:

Jessie Roth is a writer and movement organizer with more than a decade of experience at the intersection of mental health and social justice. She is the Director of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), a transformative mental health training institute bringing together mental health workers, peers, survivors, activists, artists, and other advocates for education and community development. Inspired by personal and family mental health experiences, Jessie’s work is focused on the healing power of storytelling and the importance of cross-movement organizing for mental health liberation. A longtime IDHA member, Jessie supported the development of initiatives such as Mental Health Trialogue, a forum bridging the perspectives of peers, family members, and providers; and Decarcerating Care, an ongoing panel series discussing the carceral nature of the mental health system, rooted in the voices and experiences of survivors. Her writing has been published in We've Been Too Patient: An Anthology of Voices from Radical Mental Health, the Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the Village Voice. She is also an avid home cook, passionate about the power of cooking as a care-centered creative practice.

Jessie's Website

Jessie's Substack: Cooking As Care

DEPTH Work - A Holistic Mental Health Podcast

This is a space for those who love to dive into the underbelly, to revel in the mystery, question assumptions about what is normal, play in both/and, and honour the wide range of human emotions.

As a complex trauma survivor, holistic counsellor and co-founder of a mental health institute, I learned that there is immense wisdom in our pain and what we call crazy is just what we are yet not willing to understand and explore. Let’s dive in!

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