What is Transformative Mental Health?
The field of Mental Health is in need of drastic change, but we need a vision to get us there. What would it look like in practice to build a system that truly transformed those it seeks to serve? What does mental health that is rooted in rights based, peer-centered, and holistic care look like?
“What I also really like about this model or concept of transformative mental health is not just that it highlights the roots of our differences or our pain but it also highlights the capacity for healing and mental health struggles in general to be generative or revealing of what needs to change, not just in ourselves but in our society at large.”
What is Transformative Mental Health Care?
(This definition was a collaborative evolving project of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts
IDHA is advancing a new paradigm of Transformative Mental Health. This is the practice of personal and collective healing rooted in:
SYSTEMIC CHANGE
An understanding that healing requires a critical consciousness of multiple intersecting systems of oppression and the impact our society has on our bodies, minds, and communities.
EXPERIENTIAL
KNOWLEDGE
A proliferation of our lived and embodied experiences as the most powerful form of knowledge creation. Best practices and trainings are created by or in direct collaboration with people who are labeled with mental health issues and those most impacted by trauma and harmful systems.
HOLISTIC CARE
Uplifting multiple voices and frameworks bring us closer to a full understanding of healing. Healing is a creative process. Health is far more than the absence of suffering. Healing must address the whole person (mind, body, and spirit) as well as the broader context in which the person lives. Holistic healing focuses on uncovering the multiple roots of pain, preventing suffering as opposed to treating symptoms, and honoring the the vast range of human experience.
Transformative Mental Health understands human suffering, mental difference, and the full range of emotion, as a catalyst for generative change, rather than a pathology. Transformative Mental Health is an evolving process, not a destination.
In this episode you’ll learn:
why we are in desperate need for a new vision of mental health care
what transformative mental health is, in theory and practice
3 core ingredients for practicing transformative mental health
what systemic change really looks like
what survivor led research and practice can do to change the landscape
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 the both/and, and honor 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!
Links:
Healer Mentorship Program - 1:1 four week mentorship for those wanting to start or expand their private practice
Research:
Definition of Transformative Mental health and IDHA’s history in developing it https://www.idha-nyc.org/about-idha
IDHA’s founding memebers: https://www.idha-nyc.org/our-team
Epistemic Injustice in psychiatry : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5376720/#:~:text=Epistemic injustice is a harm,of one's experiences (interpreting).
Poverty & mental health : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0063-2
Systemic causes of poverty and inequality in mental health: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12168
Survivor-led research: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2017.1320270
From cultural to structural competency: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2665216 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2665217
GROUNDING PRACTICES:
FOR ALLEVIATING FEAR, ANXIETY & DISSOCIATION
12 SIMPLE GROUNDING PRACTICES TO HELP YOU COME BACK TO YOUR BODY
