Round of applause and thank you for coming out because its important that independent booksellers keep growing in fact we are opening a new location on august 1st and would love to see you there. There will be q a after the Panel Discussion so with that q a portion please keep your questions concise and respectful and make sure to pay for the book on your way out i thought sometimes they run away feel free to explore tonight we have four incredible panelist and i moderator reading a collection of 25 essays and poems written by and for people over the Mental Health care system in america and to be dedicated to finding an alternative to the Mental HealthIndustrial Complex and through friendship on the experience of without further ado our panelist. [applause] hello everyone. I am one of the co editors that you are here on a tuesday night to have a real conversation and to hear all the Amazing Stories and great conversation. Im also the other coeditor we are grateful so i hope you enjoy the testimony of these voices and thank you for being here. And also thank you for distributing us. [laughter] [applause] so first we have Casey Gardner who is a poet likes to critique the identity and culture and digital storytellers currently pursuing her masters at ucsc so welcome to the stage. [applause] so this song is a little old so bear with me things about myself. One year ago i was in the hospital and i asked myself what i was doing here besides keeping myself from the pillbox next to my bed i could not sleep in that place yelling in the hallways sometimes i would still smell the formaldehyde and i would think am i supposed to be there now . But that question hangs but you say you need more time to learn how to love yourself before you can love me. Three months until i am supposed to see my future inside of you or three months until i move away or three months to read this poem lately everybody says the same thing. Art is not therapy. I introduce you to poetry to art because i want you to get better i started to do poetry because i wanted to get better but did i get better . Had a panic attack before i wrote this i did not eat or sleep enough everything the therapist told me to focus on before they would release me and i promised i would not fall in love with anything that was not myself and now i am so in love with you i cannot eat or sleep even though that means my anxiety is quiet i came back from the hospital just in time to jump back into my art but how can you see the scars on my risk on the rest are not healed over and i am still a single serving jello cup. Part of me is still in a room reading a poem because i know this is the only way i can heal. But if i can see that therapist again i will tell her this. I got to graduate school yesterday i spent three months in my apartment investing in my future in a year ago i did not think i had a future perk i can go into public without hearing the voices of my demons superimposed on my friends i have made progress by fixed my bicycle stopped talking to people who wanted to swallow me when my anxiety it on anxiety into my nightmares. I changed. Everybody thinks im still a little crazy. Shaking hands do not mean that i am sick. Like yesterday you kissed me and i told myself my health is more important than this last night i was supposed to write a poem and memorize it make it ready but instead i made cupcakes for quite played music im here writing about it now because that is more important than any applies this has helped me and that is more important than being the best writer or artist. I am my best self. I better than i was yesterday we are all better than we were yesterday. And that is the most important thing isnt that the best poem i had ever written . [cheers and applause] thank you spin please welcome to the stage ramona she writes in the book. [applause] infiltrating the militaryIndustrial Complex. The professional paradox it functions on ed division between Mental Health professionals on the one hand and Mental Health patient clients on the other. These Mental Health professionals have the authority to label individuals with a psychiatric and psychological disability. Supposedly the Mental Health professionals are individuals who do not possess psychiatric diagnosis or suffer from Mental Health problems. Stable or psychologically unstable. Patients and professionals are two distinct types of people. This division is rooted in the hierarchy based on class and race and ability. Supposedly they cannot be a patient or professional at the same time in the same space. But i embody both identities and experiences. On the one hand i can earn a bachelors degree and a masters in social work and work as a Mental Health therapist for over four years on the other hand i have gone through Substance Abuse treatment four times. Shortly after i experienced a druginduced Mental Health crisis where i was beaten by the police and psychiatrically hospitalized against my will. Spectrum disorder is my diagnosis i see a psychiatrist in the therapist and taking psychiatric medication ever since my Mental Health crisis. I identify myself as a social worker and therapist. Notwithstanding i self identify with a history of the anti Psychiatry Movement as a mad activist and psychiatric survivor and survivor of police totality of the military complex. This brings me to what i would like to know as a patient professional as it stipulates closer Mental Health professionals that are psychologically stable or those that are unstable than my existence as a patient professional is a paradox. To be a professional to have a body, mind, space between the binary of the patients in the professional i understand to be stigmatized and i understand the legitimate resistance to reject the idea that they are mentally ill. Navigating this division is a task that i find requires complexity, creativity. [cheers and applause] smith jesse is a writer and activist with storytelling and Mental Health and social justice codirector of the institute for the development of human art at vicki support group with the degree of narrative psychology in her writing has been published in the village. Welcome. [applause] hi. I also want to think you so much for putting this together and also to my contributors i get a little nervous with public speaking but i want to dedicate my reading to my sister. Also it is a simple idea to believe we can implement that recovery model that supports participants to reclaim overwhelming and complex situations with those damaging stories with better alternatives this narrative inquiry has a new model for Mental Health to consider the unique stories of the individuals so that the participation in the system historically is not supported and after translating those experiences the evidence that finds meeting with an experience of making it possible for a person across the country that between the future problemsolving with the overall potential for growth writing is the empowering practice and at the end of the day to understand when it is told as a story so with that essential voice of Mental Health it is too delicate or two intertwined to be assigned a singlestory to ignore the presence of story. The editors and contributors firmly believe that Mental Health is the voices of those and then to eliminate the experience that they may not otherwise understand that allows the audience to know the stories that can foster empathy and then that is unique story of our life. [applause] thank you so much first we have cofounder of the near peer network with a masters of social work and recovery specialist trader at Columbia Center currently the training director for institute and development of human arts. [applause] so heres the deal i have three minutes in a long essay i will not read to you so i will do i will read the first paragraph and then i will tell you about the context. Three years ago right now i was finishing my masters in social work at harvard and i spent 12 years of my life working on this icarus project a bunch of people who are here have also been involved in it is a network of Mental Health support groups we started that because he tried to change the language and the culture of Mental Health and Mental Illness. I went back to school because i saw the change of the people on the inside but i also went back to school because i was looking for mentorship and more guidelines to understand what it meant to be a clinician so underground transmission the Collaborative Strategies and it is 68 page paper in the parachute project and everyone on the team was trained in open dialogue and those diagnosed with psychotic disorders. But half the people were clinicians and the other half were those who were a peer specialist and then had a different perspective. So am i a clinician or a peer . And then i got interested in the working relationships so thats the context i will be the first paragraph. Its academic writing. So it is lofty and grandiose so i have this grandiose by paul bipolar disorder some people think i am grandiose. [laughter] the purpose is to lay the intellectual foundation for the development of a new generation of Mental Health support services. These services will model cooperation between clinicians and the growing peer specialist workforce and actively encourage proliferation of a vibrant independent that can creatively influence the current culture of Mental Health services. That is quite a sentence. So those in and outside of the Core Principles with selfdetermination and social justice. That is the first paragraph. Thank you. [cheers and applause] thank you so much. And intersectional administrator of how we understand the publications include the Huffington Post bad in america and truth out. So learn more on her website. Thank you so much. Thank you to everybody and their gratitude to make this possible for all of us im about to use one read a poem that is the beginning of me taking my power back. Dear doctor on that proud and glorious day you graduated from medical school you took a oath as old as hippocrates, remember cracks above all do no harm. Above all, do no harm. Do no harm. No harm. But the trouble is you thought you were doing good to warehouse us in the sterile and oppressive inhospitable place you call a hospital and practice the highest form of tough love there is. So tough i could not see no love nowhere. You place the blame squarely on our brains and serotonin flow or synapse labeling us with whatever diagnosis on whatever page you find appropriate at the time. You thought you could turn us around to make us into productive future citizens and fit into the authoritarian sexist militaristic homophobic trance phobic, i could keep going. [laughter] society your generation. You always insist we are the problem and the solution but your treatment and care did not open the brains to transform these organs so you taught me how to act and all the world is a stage and you push me to awardwinning performances so those indispensable grip on scribbles on the pad in those 15 minutes that you gave me in a word it was freedom or a glimmer perhaps i give you too much credit oh dear doctor assuming maybe more than billable hours or another bed filled until the money runs out dear doctor you will never know on your ivory tower of the second floor how many years i spent struggling to undo the harm that you did with the best of intentions to pave my road to help echo i declare war on all that you scribbled in my chart to build a new char chart, charting a course of humanity and dignity and all the while hippocrates bones are shivering in his grave. Dear doctor. [cheers and applause] up next we have miami zing co. Editor to co edit and contribute we are to patient to write poetry or nonfiction and is a literary fellow an english professor welcome. Thank you for being here into the contributors i am proud to be in the chorus of voices with you and thats the theme of what i wanted to share with you tonight with my part of the introduction that is segmented out. Feel that my part all our contributors the publisher has brought into being i went to claim my seat at the table i am compelled to disclose that i am a Mental Health consumer a lifelong patient but i must claim the others to. As a consumer i am frustrated with Services Rendered insufficient at best as a psychiatric survivor i am healing from the traumas put on me from the Industrial Complex i have many stories to tell about psychiatry or therapy to say im a Mental Health advocate it feels right but there is another reason it feels neutral to suggest my suffering is housed within stigma troubles the bulk of my distress can be labeled as depression and anxiety but to speak truth to power to honor the strength of my condition the reluctance from the able powered structure because i fear those repercussions state stigma that causes me to lose my job these are reasonable fears. And then to bring forth another desire and the other contributors to this book because there is nothing about this to have the major strength of this book. Every story comes at those with a lived experience to deny all the complexities to protect myself from the structure the ambition of the project i believe my diagnosis of bipolar disorder is from Early Childhood trauma and psychiatric trauma the experience later in life that could be looked through the lens of oppression perk i have many tools of medication is one of them and spirituality but the biggest tool is radical acceptance but with this book i give myself the permission to be out and proud as a survivor advocate with the trauma in some predisposition im narrow a typical and i have dangerous gifts and pride to heal the ragged edges while i call on my differences to be a force for change. Thank you. [applause] so now bozo miamis inane co editor. Mental Health Advocate the first book with radical Mental Health is now released today. [cheers and applause] thank you. So many people came since the last time i was up here. So one more than we will break for the panel this is called she was not crazy. She wasnt crazy but the world had a way to make her feel you try to be a black doctor in georgia. And how the darkness wrapped around her like a blanket too sensitive and too reactive but everything at high voltage she could do what ever the fuck she wanted. She crawled up the fires escape she wanted to know if she let go she imagined a place she wasnt crazy that when grandma the old treatment distal to the matriarch marvels that when grandma died started to choke her because when your world ends and you are still alive there is something crazy about that. She was 13 she was crazy but distinct as fuck she did not want to live all her mom could say is why . Why . Was she crazy she did not feel crazy to send her down like an animal and put her on suicide watch. She felt crazy then. With that stench of death they separated the kids with the eating disorder from the crazy kids. Never making on i contact they all dreamed of mcdonalds french fries on the purgatory button and one day christine tried to open the locked door but the Security Guard said we lock it to keep the crazy people out. She laughed uncontrollably but in hindsight he was right because when she left she created a papiermache mask of glitter and art and smiled until her eyes bugged out stop playing with the eyeliner to make everybody feel comfortable. She lied about the darkness. All better now. The moment you stop telling the truth that is the moment she was truly crazy. Thank you. [cheers and applause] and also to introduce our contributors and editors and we will be moderating you will go down and introduce themselves quickly. So i will just go ahead and ask. The first question is generally who is this book for . [laughter] it is for those who were in the Mental Health system or loved ones. Or therapist. It is for anyone who has been touched by Mental Health social workers or teachers so that is everyone but really everyone. [laughter] so what is the biomedical model of Mental Illness i have so much to say about the model but one of the ways that i understand that i have learned so much because of a lot of work around but number one the biomedical model separates the mind from the body and then separates a person from the environment and we always come up with the new theory and with that focus it is one of the most destructive things about it because we talk about people as a burden as a global burden of disease but it is with biology and mere human beings but we are influenced by our environment and it is a political in the way that we understand that. [applause]