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Guest: Sally Littlefield is a schizophrenia advocate, speaker, and consultant who provides trainings on psychosis, crisis de-escalation, and stigma reduction for healthcare systems and community organizations. Drawing on her lived experience with schizoaffective disorder, she focuses on helping providers better understand what psychosis feels like from the inside and how that impacts engagement, trust, and outcomes. Her work has been featured in Slate, STAT News, and Psychology Today, and she regularly speaks with clinicians about improving care for people with complex mental health needs.
Website (general): sallylittlefield.com
Trainings for clinicians & mental health teams: sallylittlefield.com/trainings-workshops
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-littlefield-68876398/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schizophrenicsally/
Host: Rob Gadomski, DO is the Deputy Medical Director of Psychiatric Services at Project Renewal, Inc and a graduate of the Columbia Public Psychiatry Fellowship. He works primarily with homeless and marginalized individuals in the New York City area. He went to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine for medical school and completed his psychiatry residency training at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia before moving to NYC, where he gathered an interest in working with homeless populations and individuals interacting with the criminal legal system.
Editor: Mike Zhang, a fourth-year medical student, is drawn to community psychiatry because it bridges clinical care with public health and social support, allowing him to work directly with underserved populations. Having lived in diverse places and seen how community context shapes well-being, he values psychiatry’s potential to address mental health through connection and collaboration. He is especially interested in how preventive and rehabilitative services can improve long-term outcomes for individuals and families.
Social Media Content Creators: Julia Kooser is a resident doctor who believes that addressing social drivers of health is imperative for maintaining psychological and mental health. During medical school, she was able to take part in initiatives to distribute naloxone to people within the community, and also took part in hosting voter registration events to mobilize individuals within the local community. Julia believes that when people have the ability to meet their basic needs, such as having access to housing and access to medical care and voting for individuals that represent their best interests, individuals are empowered to live happy and fulfilled lives. She feels that community psychiatry is the best vehicle for understanding these social drivers of health, and to enact change that makes the world more equitable and just.
Jesse Ortiz is a fourth-year medical student who came into community psychiatry through street medicine work, both fields that are committed to providing effective and compassionate healthcare to people who are often overlooked by medical institutions. He believes that community psychiatry is an innovative and meaningful way to address the complicated history of psychiatry and its relationship to the carceral state and various forms of violence. Jesse feels that community psychiatry is a field that truly aims to put the patient first and address their needs as whole people in their unique socioeconomic context.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guest speakers and are not representative of their employers or affiliated organizations.
Created by the American Association for Community Psychiatry (AACP).
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