I’m really interested in how our individual healing journeys intersect with the collective transformation of society. This website is for my private practice but it’s also for what I’m calling my “public practice:” the writing I do, the workshops I facilitate, the organizing I’m involved in, and the international network of changemakers and creatives I’m connected to. I hope you’ll join me in finding ways to thrive outside mainstream ideas of mental health.

Speaking and Workshops

Are you interested in booking me to come speak at your school or your mental health institution? That’s great, because I am available for speaking engagements (keynotes, panels, book readings, workshop facilitation etc.) on a wide variety of topics. Contact me here.

From 3-Hour-Long to 3-Day-Long Workshops

• Transformative Mutual Aid Practices

• Navigating Brilliance and Madness

• Mad Resistance/Mad Alternatives

• Creative Strategies for Peer Support

Consulting

As someone who was both harmed and helped from my interactions with psychiatry, I’m really interested in Collaborative Strategies for Re-Visioning the Public Mental Health System. In the Icarus Project we developed  hybrid models of explicitly peer-support and direct action that incorporated multiple publications, narrative advocacy, and authentic virtual international communities. We became a change agent in the mental health field, giving voice to thousands alienated by traditional mental health treatment.

After many years of working outside the public system I decided to get my Master’s in Social Work and try working from the inside. From 2016-2019 I was the Recovery Specialist and Trainer at the Center for Practice Innovations, the research and training body of the Office of Mental Health of the State of New York. I was the principal developer of the Peer Specialist role for OnTrackNY, an innovative clinical model engaging young people experiencing a first episode of psychosis. I was also the Peer Specialist trainer for all 102 Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) Teams in New York State.

During this time I gained a lot of insight into the workings of the public mental health system and became ever more convinced of the need for people like myself to have roles in shaping practice and policy from the inside. With a group of friends and allies we created the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, a training institute for mental health workers and a think tank for the emerging Transformative Mental Health Movement. I’m available for consultation and I bring a lot of curiosity, personal experience and the voices of a growing social movement to my work.

Writing

I have been keeping a written journal for the past 25 years. I published my first book at the age of 21 about organizing a traveling circus with a bunch of anarchist squatters from the Lower East Side of New York. For many years I had a regular gardening column in the punk magazine “Slug & Lettuce”. The Icarus Project initially grew from an article I wrote in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. A few years ago I wrote a well received book called Maps to the Other Side: The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer and created a website based on it. I’m not posting on it so much these days but you can still find a bunch of my writing here and you can order my book from Microcosm.