ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

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9:15am EST

Keynote Speaker - The Hope of Harm Reduction: New Strategies for Building Connection Across Realities (Hybrid)

Friday November 6, 2026 9:15am - 10:30am EST

Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Harm reduction philosophy and approaches have made great headway in reducing alienation and deaths of despair in the world of substance use. How can we apply the lessons of these models and community spaces to our work supporting people in non-consensus reality states? What might we gain by letting go of practices that focus on control or reality-checking and starting to embrace strategies voice-hearers use in real-life scenarios to survive? This session will focus on practical ways to reduce power differentials and offer support that feels authentic and responsive to the unique situation of each experiencer. We explore how shifting our paradigm can create new paths forward.

Speakers

Caroline Mazel-Carlton, CPS, BA

Director of Learning Opportunities, Wildflower Alliance

Caroline Mazel-Carlton is a voice-hearer, a former IV drug user and a survivor of institutional trauma in both the psychiatric and criminal legal systems. She now works to promote harm reduction, hope and human rights as the Director of Learning Opportunities for the Wildflower... Read More →

Friday November 6, 2026 9:15am - 10:30am EST
Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice 524 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019

Keynote, Hybrid

10:45am EST

Keynote Speaker - Urhomelessness: Understanding Psychosis as a Person-World Experience (Hybrid)

Friday November 6, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EST

Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

What if psychosis was not only related to the social world, but also fundamentally constituted by both person and world? This presentation will offer a social-phenomenological understanding of psychosis as an experience that is constituted through person-world configurations. Predominant historical conceptualizations of psychosis have located the experience within individuals, often minimizing the relevance of social circumstance and context. A growing body of research has identified that many of the social and structural correlates of psychosis historically seen as its sequelae –including social marginalization, socioeconomic disadvantage, housing insecurity, forced migration, and urbanicity-- are better conceived as etiologically relevant risk factors. Drawing on phenomenological-existential, epidemiological, and sociocultural research, this lecture will posit that the social world is not only a determinant of psychosis but also a constitutive facet of the psychotic structure itself. In doing so, I will synthesize across four areas of theory and research: (1) historical accounts of the social dimensions of psychosis, including the institutional psychotherapy movement in postwar France that forms part of the framework for this conference; (2) phenomenological and transcultural research on urhomelessness as a unique mode of being-in-the-world characterized by profound lack of safety and foreclosed belonging; (3) the growing body of evidence for social defeat models of psychosis and structural determinants of mental distress more broadly; and (4) Brent Dean Robbins and colleagues’ work positing psychiatric diagnosis as a potential form of structural scapegoating that locates social pathologies within individuals. The lecture will conclude by considering the implications of this social-phenomenological and structural understanding of psychosis for contemporary mental health research and practice. In doing so, I will explore the possibility that conventional diagnostic frameworks, and the institutions built upon them, are not merely responses to extreme states but may themselves participate in the structural processes through which psychosis is constituted and sustained. These questions will be addressed in relation to contemporary discourse concerning involuntary intervention and reinstitutionalization in New York City.

Speakers

Sarah Kamens, PhD

Editor, Journal of Humanistic Psychology

Sarah R. Kamens, PhD is a clinical psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on theories of mental distress, including phenomenological-existential approaches to psychosis and structural violence. Kamens holds an MA in Communication from the European Graduate... Read More →

Friday November 6, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EST
Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice 524 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019

Keynote, Hybrid

ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

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ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

9:15am EST

Caroline Mazel-Carlton, CPS, BA

10:45am EST

Sarah Kamens, PhD

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