Sean Blackwell: Breathwork for Bipolar and Psychosis

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Do bipolar and psychosis have a healing potential blocked by suppression, medications, and avoidance? What if we could help people safely and intentionally explore, express, and understand these frightening states? Can breathwork ceremonies open the doors of perception like psychedelics — but without the drugs or risks?

Life After Psych Meds: Laura Delano

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How can people come off psychiatric medications in the safest way? What are the key lessons and vital ingredients for leaving psychiatric care? Is there life after meds? Laura Delano spent 14 years as a psychiatric patient before she left behind her psychiatric diagnoses and reclaimed herself. Today she is Director of the Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project, working to support drug withdrawal and build community beyond the mental health system.

Elisabeth: Ayahuasca Psychosis and Spiritual Awakening

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After taking the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, Elisabeth went into an extended altered state diagnosed as psychotic. Her terrifying ordeal ignited a spiritual initiation that eventually brought gifts of awakening, insight, and compassion.

Jyl Ion: Awakening as a Medium

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Jyl Ion hears voices, but she refuses to view these non-ordinary experiences as a sign of mental illness. Instead Jyl came off 16 years of multiple toxic medications, talks to her ancestor spirits and has reclaimed access to unsanctioned knowledge.

George Mecouch: Jungian Therapy for Psychosis

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Has modern psychiatry lost its soul? How can dreams, storytelling, and imagination help people in emotional crisis – including psychosis and madness? What lessons can we learn from shamanism, the placebo effect, and the importance of the doctor’s “bedside manner’? George Mecouch MD, psychiatrist, Jungian therapist, and author of While Psychiatry Slept: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy, discusses how to recover the lost art of healing in an era dominated by technology.

Michael Guy Thompson: The Legacy Of RD Laing

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An interview with Michael Guy Thompson, a psychoanalyst and founder of the Gnosis Retreat Center, who worked with R.D. Laing in London and has created hospital alternative sanctuaries for people struggling with experiences called psychosis.

Rachel Jane Liebert: Decolonizing Early Psychosis

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Do early psychosis programs serve healing – or function as surveillance and control? Are treatments for paranoia actually themselves forms of paranoia, based on scientific racism and white supremacy?

Caroline Mazel-Carlton: Judaism Madness and Spirit

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Voice hearers, mystics, visionaries, and mad people are found throughout the scriptures of Judaism. What does Jewish theology have to teach us about madness and psychiatric diagnosis?

Gogo Ekhaya Esima: Traditional South African Healing

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How can seeing visions and hearing voices be transformed into a spiritual gift for healing? What does the initiation ordeal into becoming a shaman involve? Gogo Ekhaya Esima was diagnosed with psychosis and confined in psychiatric hospitals before she became an initiated Sangoma healer in the Zulu tradition of South Africa.

Phil Borges: Is Madness a Breakdown or Initiation into a Spiritual Calling?

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Is madness breakdown or initiation into a spiritual calling? Crazywise is a new documentary film that explores the meaning of psychosis from the perspective of traditional cultures and shamanism, following the stories of people struggling with extreme ...

The Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs

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Based on more than 10 years work in the peer support movement,The Icarus Project and Freedom Center’s 52-page guide is used internationally by individuals, families, professionals, and organizations to support reducing and coming off psychiatric drugs.

Olga Runciman: Compassionate Psychotherapy

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Olga Runciman, voice hearer, psychiatric nurse in locked wards, and survivor of a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, brings her experience with recovery to her work as a psychotherapist in private practice.

Fritjof Capra: Systems View of Life

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What does healthcare become when science is limited by a mechanistic, machine view of reality? How does a mechanistic view shape concepts of mental health and illness – and deny the fundamental aliveness of human beings? What does the study of living systems teach us for creating a different, more holistic vision?

Sabrina Louise: Sane Vegan Transition

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Does a diet without animal products improve mental health? Why can changing to plant based nutrition be so hard to sustain? And are people's food ethics a symptom of an eating disorder and neglected self-care?

Nina Packebush: Girls Like Me

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What’s it like to be a teenager in a psychiatric hospital? What is it like to be a queer pregnant teenager? Is it true that friends do make the best medicine? Nina Packebush explores these questions and more in her groundbreaking debut young adult novel: Girls Like Me.

Evelin Lindner: Dignity and Humiliation

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Evelin Lindner was nominated 3 times for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work internationally to overcome the roots of violence and war. Her Dignity and Humiliation Studies initiative is showing a new way to treat each other — from our most intimate relations to our international foreign policies — and also in our response to mental health crisis.

Lisa Forestell: Hearing Voices Movement and the Western Massachusetts Learning Community

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What is it like to hear voices — and are all voices harmful or can they also be helpers? What does voice hearing say about the human mind – and the society we live in?

Jim van Os: New Vision for Psychiatry

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Jim van Os, professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Maastricht University and member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science with more than 700 publications, is one of the top one percent highly cited scientists in the world.

Bhargavi Davar: Human Rights in India

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Bhargavi Davar’s mother Bapu was a psychiatric abuse survivor persecuted for her religious devotion.

Nirali Shah: Meditation and Liberation

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Nirali Shah, certified UCLA mindfulness facilitator and teacher at Spirit Rock, has spent thousands of hours meditating, as well as serving in one of the largest slum communities of Asia.

Leah Harris: Stop The Murphy Bill

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Leah Harris, psychiatric abuse survivor and organizer for the Campaign for Real Change in Mental Health Policy, completed an investigative report on the Murphy Bill’s potential impact on people in crisis, how the gun manufacturer lobby is involved, and the role of Otsuka Pharmaceuticals.

Frank Bures: Geography of Madness

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Frank Bures, author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes, looks beyond travel literature’s colonial superiority and explores how meaning, perception, and belief shape what we think of as “real” in disease and health.

Naas Siddiqui: Intergenerational Trauma

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Naas Siddiqui, a psychiatric survivor and therapist in training who founded the Spiritual Emergence and other Unusual Experiences student group, descended into altered states after withdrawing from psychiatric medications.

Mary O’Hara: Economic Austerity and Mental Health

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Guardian columnist Mary O’Hara, author of Austerity Bites, discusses the devastating impact of austerity economic policies in Europe, the scapegoating mindset behind social spending cuts, and the dangers of pursuing similar policies in the US and globally.

Herman Garcia – Ryan Bemis: Borderlands Acupuncture

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Herman Garcia is the Vice President and Ryan Bemis Founder of Crossroads Community Supported Healthcare, which offers practical skills training to local healers in the violence-stricken communities of Ciudad Juarez and Sierra Tarahumara, Mexico.