Personal Resources
Personal Growth/Mental Health
Advocacy/Services
“a 36-acre educational nonprofit located in the Upper Ojai Valley. For over 40 years, our land and programs have been a beacon for youth and adults seeking ways to deepen relationship with self, each other, and the natural world.”
“In 2009, Gretchen Rubin’s breakout book, The Happiness Project, became a New York Times #1 bestseller and revolutionized the way people approach personal development. Over the last decade, she has taken her approach to creating a happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative life off those pages and into the daily lives of her readers and listeners through her books, blog, podcast, online courses, and weekly newsletter.”
The Human Library is an international organization and movement that first started in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2000. It aims to address people's prejudices by helping them to talk to those they would not normally meet. The organization uses a library analogy of lending people rather than books.
“MindSite News is a new nonprofit, nonpartisan digital journalism organization dedicated to reporting on mental health in America, exposing rampant policy failures and spotlighting efforts to solve them. We seek to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the workings and failings of the U.S. mental health system and to impact that system through our reporting, making it more equitable, effective, transparent and humane in its care for individuals and families struggling with mental illness.”
National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR) —
“will ensure that consumer/survivors have a major voice in the development and implementation of health care, mental health, and social policies at the state and national levels, empowering people to recover and lead a full life in the community.”
“We are THE place for young adults in Toronto, aged 16 to 29, who are experiencing mental health challenges to get the support they need. The Stella’s Place ‘menu’ includes peer supports, clinical, online, employment, wellness, and recovery services as well as opportunities to explore your creative self through studio programs.” Though a step in the right direction, this program does not encourage or facilitate untrained people providing mutual support to each other. This top-down excessive reliance on training reinforces the System.
Articles/Op-eds/Essays
The Rise of Therapy-Speak, Katy Waldman.
“How a language got off the couch and into the world. First, let’s survey the situation. It’s as though the haze of our inner lives were being filtered through a screen of therapy work sheets. If we are especially online, or roaming the worlds of friendship, wellness, activism, or romance, we must consider when we are centering ourselves or setting boundaries, sitting with our discomfort or being present. We “just want to name” a dynamic. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down. We’re doing the work. We need to do the work.” Read More
The New York Times Series on Mental Health. [behind paywall]
It’s Not Just You.
America’s mental health crisis isn’t just about our unhappiness as individuals. It’s about the world we live in: our economy, our culture, our medical establishment. Americans have long treated mental health as a personal matter. But until we realize that society shapes our mental health and how we treat it, we won’t be able to feel better.
[read more — behind paywall]
Mental Health Is Political, Danielle Carr.
What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?...
..Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one;...
Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to address the underlying cause of population-level increases in mental and emotional distress. ...
Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to infrastructure that buffers them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.
A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power if we are going to win solutions.
[read more — behind paywall]
Posted in Personal Growth/Mental Health/Articles
What Bob Dylan Wanted at Twenty-three, Nat Hentoff.
A portrait of the artist trying to move past “finger-pointing” songs, and finding a new voice in the process.
How We Stopped Believing That People Can Change (behind paywall), Rebecca Solnit.
"...We as a society seem unequipped to recognize transformations, just as we lack formal processes — other than monetary settlements — for those who have harmed others to make reparations as part of their repentance or transformation... beyond the individual cases comes the need for something broader: a recognition that people change, and that most of us have and will, and that much of that is because in this transformative era, we are all being carried along on a river of change." READ MORE (behind paywall)
Changing Psychiatry’s Mind, Gavin Francis.
“Among her conclusions to Mind Fixers, Harrington quotes the social science finding that many psychiatric patients have a better response to being provided with ‘their own apartment and/or access to supportive communities, than being given a [prescription] for a new or stronger antipsychotic.’ ...in my own family practice I look after two such ‘sheltered housing’ complexes for people with chronic mental illness. The arrangement works beautifully: when given social support and primary health care, these patients rarely need the attention of psychiatrists at all....”
The Desk and the Daring, Dayna Tortorici.
“Vivian Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership.” A remarkable story of one woman’s evolution in pursuit of “expressiveness.”
Should Work Be Passion, or Duty?, Firmin DeBrabander.
Baggage Check Advice Column, Andrea Bonior.
Personal Weaknesses, Wade Lee Hudson.
What Will Our New Normal Feel Like? Hints Are Beginning to Emerge, Max Fisher.
”Fear of others may linger long after the pandemic is over. But so may a new sense of community.”
Depressed? Here’s a Bench. Talk to Me., Tina Rosenberg
Interventions to Prevent Psychosis, Jane E. Brody
The Troubled History of Psychiatry, Jerome Groopman
Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris, Gary Greenberg
Don't Say That Depression Is Caused by a Chemical Imbalance, Steve Rathje
The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs, Rachel Aviv
Books
Healing: The Act of Radical Self-Care, Dr. Joi Lewis.
“More than ever, the world needs a message of healing.
Healing offers radical self-care as a salve to help you hold heartbreak and hope. When you're an emotional laborer, healer, activist, community leader, or voice for change, the burden of oppression, trauma, and sorrow can seem never-ending. When you're facing nonstop heartache day-to-day, it's easy to wish for total numbness. But when you can't feel pain, you can't feel joy.
Radical self-care and liberation coach Dr. Joi Lewis has one simple word for you: Healing.
In Healing, Dr. Joi Lewis offers a powerful framework for all who want to uncover their heartbreak and reach for connection. The remedies in Healing will help you confront every aspect of your life that demands radical self-care. Dr. Joi's life-changing Orange Method (OM) inspires you to interrupt historic cycles of oppression and fully reclaim your humanity using practices for both self-care and community care. Healing is a path to transformation when your back is against the wall and you're buckling under the weight of everyday life.
Joy is possible and unlimited. It's also worth reaching for. Healing is the beginning of your restorative journey back to you, your community, and your greater yet to be.
Dr. Joi Lewis is the CEO and Founder of Joi Unlimited Coaching & Consulting and the Orange Method. As a "bodyworker" for the collective body (systems) and individual bodies (self), Dr. Joi (as many fondly call her) is a community and cultural healer who holds space for the discovery of critical pressure points for liberation and healing from trauma through radical self-care. Dr. Joi is a highly sought after consultant, coach, and facilitator of liberation locally, nationally, and globally. After a 20+ year career in higher education, she now describes herself as the "artist-activist formerly known as Dean Lewis." She is an unapologetic joy instigator, a certified Kemetic and hot vinyasa yoga teacher, and a leader of meditation and mindfulness. Dr. Joi believes in interrupting oppressor patterns (including her own) with loving kindness so we can reach for our own humanity and each others'. You can find Dr. Joi online at joiunlimited.”
Detox Your Thoughts: Quit Negative Self-Talk for Good & Discover the Life You’ve Always Wanted, Andrea Bonior.
“Psychologist Bonior (Psychology), who writes the Baggage Check column for the Washington Post, dazzles in this smart, sensible guide to vanquishing negative thoughts.”
The Politics of Experience (1967), R.D. Laing
Interviews
Ignoring Your Ego, David Brooks (also podcast)
Poetry
renovations after surviving the worst of covid, devorah major.
Quotes
”Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Audre Lorde
"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer," - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Speeches
Websites