In this episode of the Open Excellence Podcast with Rudy Caseres we explore alternatives to coercion and forced psychiatric treatment for youth and how families can best support their children in distress.

Guests:

Mark Henick is a mental health advocate strategist, author. His new book So-Called Normal: A Memoir of Family, Depression and Resilience will be coming out this January about his personal lived experience, recovering from suicidal depression. He has been featured in various TV news outlets and print publications including CNN, Virgin Radio, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Entertainment Tonight, PageSix, Perez Hilton, CBC News, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the Independent, the Chicago Tribune, and many others. His TED Talk, "Why We Choose Suicide," has been viewed nearly 7 million times on YouTube. Mark is available to media for comment on a broad range of issues relating to mental health and can be contacted through his website MarkHenick.com.

Sheryl Boswell is the executive director of Youth Mental Health Canada and an educator who has taught elementary, secondary post-secondary and adult education. She is also a suicide loss survivor as well as a child and youth mental health expert with years of experience.

Resources: 

A cross-sectional study of experienced coercion in adolescent mental health inpatients - BMJ Health Services Research study

So-Called Normal: A Memoir of Family, Depression and Resilience by Mark Henick

Youth Mental Health Canada

Study Reveals How Psychiatric Staff Rationalize Coercion with Children (Mad in America)

Learn more about our non-profit organization and become a donor at OpenExcellence.org

Theme Music: "It's All Alright" by Alexandra Woodward

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Open Excellence Podcast, hosted by Rudy Caseres. On this episode we will learn all about forced psychiatric treatment including stories from survivors, a clinician's perspective, why forced treatment is so harmful, and possible solutions for a more humane mental health care system.

Guests interviewed in this episode:

Dr. Sandra Steingard, clinical psychiatrist/Open Excellence Board Member/Editor of Critical Psychiatry:Controversies and Clinical Implications

Felix Guzman, Peer Specialist/Harm Reduction and Human Rights Advocate/ Author of YOU HOLD SPACE, YOU HAVE VALUE, YOU ARE LOVED!

Emma McMurphy (Pseudonym): Clinical Mental Health Counselor Graduate Student/Anti-Forced Treatment Activist

To learn more about our non-profit foundation as well as donate to our causes please visit openexcellence.org. There you can also sign-up for our Recovery Weekly newsletter. Thank you to all of our donors who help make the Open Excellence Podcast and other very meaningful and life-changing programs possible.

Resources: 

FelixGuzman.com - where you can preorder his new book YOU HOLD SPACE, YOU HAVE VALUE, YOU ARE LOVED!

National Association For Rights Protection and Advocacy

FireweedCollective.org (Formerly the Icarus Project)

Alternatives to Suicide online support groups

National Empowerment Center (includes online educational programs organized by peers)

New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services -

Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications - Edited by Dr. Sandra Steingard

MadinAmerica.com (includes blogs and online educational programs)

Info of peer respites in the United States

Theme music: "It's All Alright" by Alexandra Woodward

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Open Excellence Podcast, hosted by Rudy Caseres. On this episode we will learn all about drug harm reduction including what makes people take drugs in the first place, alternatives to abstinence-only treatment programs, how to define recovery, the importance of a safe supply, what counts as a "hard drug," and the wide-spread effects of the War on Drugs and criminalization of drug users.

Guests interviewed in this episode:

Caroline Mazel-Carton, Director of Training, Wildflower Alliance, Home of the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community.

Carly Larson: Peer Support Program Manager, Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners

Emily Roberts, Psychotherapist/Licensed Mental Health Counselor/Author, Express Yourself: A Teen Girl’s Guide to Speaking Up and Being Who You Are

To learn more about our non-profit foundation as well as donate to our causes please visit openexcellence.org. There you can also sign-up for our Recovery Weekly newsletter. And thank you to all of our donors who help make the Open Excellence Podcast and other very meaningful and life-changing programs possible.

Theme music: "It's All Alright" by Alexandra Woodward

Welcome to the very first episode of the Open Excellence Podcast, hosted by Rudy Caseres. Each week we will learn together about some of the most important issues in mental health care including promising research, leading voices, and new innovations. This week we will learn all about Open Excellence including its founding, mission, leadership, achievements, and hopes for the future. Featuring interviews with Open Excellence change-makers past, present and future: critical psychiatrist Sandra Steingard, Open Dialogue pioneer Dr. Chris Gordon and peer services champion Keris Myrick.

To learn more about our non-profit foundation as well as donate to our causes please visit openexcellence.org.

Justin Palanci, MD, is an Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He serves as Medical Director for the Assertive Community Treatment program at Grady Memorial Hospital.   He is Co-Director of Open Dialogue Atlanta, an outpatient program located at the Grady Behavioral Health Clinic. Open Dialogue occurs through network meetings that are held with the person at the center of concern, their support network, and are co-facilitated by two or more clinicians.   Dr. Palanci attended medical school at George Washington University where he received the Jerry M Weiner Award in Psychiatry. He completed his general psychiatry residency at Emory University where he was a Wellborn fellow and Chief of the Outpatient Program. Dr. Palanci is certified as a dialogic practitioner through the Institute for Dialogic Practice.

Claire Bien is a research associate at the Yale University Program for Recovery and Community Health, mental health advocate and educator, and author—her memoir, Hearing Voices, Living Fully: Living with the Voices in My Head (https://amzn.to/3d6nXiG), was published in 2016. Claire kept silence about her experiences, hospitalizations, and diagnoses, for over 26 years, and achieved a modest career as a public and community relations professional and grantwriter for nonprofit human services agencies. She began speaking out in 2009, after her employer asked her to begin engaging in the work of mental health advocacy. Claire says of her experiences and her life, “I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones, who with understanding and support learned to stand up to my voices and build a modest career. It has been a full life, even a good one, but had I known then what I know now, I might have been able to do more.” Thus one of Claire’s missions is to do what she can to increase understanding – and accompanying practice – that it is the social conditions of our lives that create the distress, which left unacknowledged, unaddressed, and unresolved, can lead to grievous mental health challenges, which in turn can lead to the array of experiences that are associated with psychosis. And it is the social supports that we have, find, and create for ourselves, that allow us to develop the strength, understanding  and eventually resilience to learn to truly live.

Carol Magrone, M.A., having begun in mid-life a career as a mental health and substance abuse clinician as well as a health educator in both the community and a corrections setting, has continued her endeavors to offer mental health support during her retirement over the past 15 years. She has been a facilitator of a National Alliance on Mental Illness Family and Friends Support Group and a co-facilitator of a Hearing Voices Support Group with the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community. She was recently invited to participate in monthly online meetings with family support group facilitators which includes participants from coast to coast in the USA. They are currently examining and defining the purpose of family groups and working on how to expand the availability of family groups based on the values of the Hearing Voices Network.

Cindy Peterson-Dana is the Vice President for Peer and Recovery Support Services at MHA of Westchester. She has worked in the mental health field in the United States, in St. Louis, Boston and primarily in the New York City area, as a clinician, advocate and in management since 1984 in a variety of grassroots and professional settings. Beginning in 1991, she joined with early leaders in the survivor and peer movement to bring the issue of civil rights and the voice of lived experience (peer and family) into the conversation. In 2010, Ms. Peterson-Dana became familiar with the Open Dialogue approach developed by Jaakko Seikkula Ph.D and his team in Tornio, Finland. She has worked to integrate the shared vision and practices of mutual peer support and dialogic treatment into practice at the Mental Health Association of Westchester (MHA) in the Hudson Valley, just north of New York City. She recently completed her certification as a trainer through the Institute for Dialogic Practice and is currently implementing a Peer Supported Open Dialogue (POD) approach to treatment and services at MHA.

Beatrice Birch, co-founder of Inner Fire- ‘Deep Healing without Meds’, worked as a Hauschka Artistic Therapist in integrative clinics, rehabilitation centers and prisons in England, Holland and the USA, where her work called upon the whole human being: body, soul and spirit. Her belief in the creative human spirit and the choice to be proactive in the healing journey is foundational to all her work.  

The Inner Fire Fund at Open Excellence is raising support to complete construction of the second wing, which will allow family members to come on retreat to learn and join in the healing journey.

Ana Florence, PhD, is a Clinical Psychologist with experience in deinstitutionalization and the implementation of community based mental health services. Her research interests include the medicalization of poverty, social determinants of health and the Open Dialogue approach. Dr. Florence's doctoral thesis described how the Open Dialogue approach, originally developed in Finland as a form of psychotherapy and a way to organize mental health systems, was received, adapted and implemented in two locations in the United States. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health working in partnership with the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services in Connecticut.