ISPS-US Annual Conference 2026

12:00pm EST

Friday November 6, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST

Join us for a meet and greet with conference sponsors Ellenhorn!

For more than 20 years, Ellenhorn has redefined behavioral health care through its innovative "hospital without walls" model, delivering psychiatric and psychosocial support directly in clients' communities. Grounded in the Program for Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) model, Ellenhorn helps adults preserve their independence, strengthen social connections, and rebuild meaningful lives with dignity at the center of care. We serve clients in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles.

Friday November 6, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Meet & Greet, Virtual Only

1:30pm EST

The Transformative Power of Peers (Virtual Only)

Friday November 6, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Virtual Room

The Transformative Power of Peers

1:30-2pm The Role of Peer Specialists & Radical Powerlessness - Abaigeal (Abbe) Duke, Elise Diamond
2-2:30pm Redefining Community and Enlarging Connection: Peer Support on Discord from Wildflower Alliance - Claudia Wilson, MSW, MFA, Michal Ditkoff
2:30-3pm The Peer Message in the Psychiatric Hospital - Patrick Kaufmann, CPSS, CPRC, BS, Shannon Kaufmann, CPSS, ITE

The Role of Peer Specialists & Radical Powerlessness - Abaigeal (Abbe) Duke, Elise Diamond
The profession of Peer Specialist goes well beyond merely being a person with lived experience. Peer Specialist is the only role in the mental health system specifically intended to undermine and interrupt power relationships, with a well-developed body of practices and competencies in service to those goals. In this panel discussion featuring Abaigeal Duke and Elise Diamond, the Peer Specialist Training Department at OnTrackNY, we will explore some examples of how Peer Specialists do radical powerlessness, what other provider roles can learn from Peer Specialists, and how the Peer Specialist role can be truly integrated into multidisciplinary (particularly Coordinated Specialty Care) teams to transform all aspects of care.The conversation will begin with sharing some stories about the role of power relationships in the public mental health system and how Peer Specialists recognize and trouble those power relationships. The panelists will then facilitate a conversation to surface participant’s experiences with power relationships. We will collectively identify strategies for interrupting power, putting into practice the core Peer Specialist competency of drawing out the expertise that already exists in any given group of people.

Redefining Community and Enlarging Connection: Peer Support on Discord from Wildflower Alliance - Claudia Wilson, MSW, MFA, Michal Ditkoff
Peer Support is done from the point of view of lived experience. It offers connection and camaraderie through relationships, but what happens when those relationships are jeopardized by the Covid 19 pandemic? What do organizations do to continue social connection and rebuff against alienation? In 2006 a peer-support worker within the Wildflower Alliance, Natan Cohen created a discord platform for folks to come together using Wildflower Alliance Values to have spaces to share mental health challenges, problems, and receive support. Since that time, this online community has grown to over three-thousand members, many within Massachusetts and many from around the globe. While this community is still growing and learning, it has become a space that offers members possibilities and connection. This happens due to the dedicated participation of volunteers, staff, and community members who help to co-create space and a culture of care. Folks who attend this workshop will hear about how we hold space, handle conflict, and maintain a deep sense of connectivity by practicing our guidelines and approach. We aim to consistently (through learning together) grow and discover new ways forward. A few of our guidelines include: “not giving a personal assessment of other people's experiences unless they ask about it,” and “not using clinical language” so as to not reproduce the harm that has happened in clinical settings. The presenters of this abstract are Wildflower Alliance employees who started using the space as regular, ordinary members, who then wanted to be a part of this work in deeper ways. While we are not the founders/creators of this space we have contributed significantly to the diversity/variety of this space by adding our presence and lived experience of being Black, Queer, and Neurodivergent. We provide peer-support in this space, creative projects, and play within this community. Together we affirm the values of the space to welcome anyone and to continually co-create space intentionally.

The Peer Message in the Psychiatric Hospital - Patrick Kaufmann, CPSS, CPRC, BS, Shannon Kaufmann, CPSS, ITE
Presenters will share briefly on personal experience as a voice hearer and as a spouse of a voice hearer. They will describe their experiences with bringing recovery groups and specifically a hearing voices group into the psychiatric hospital. Attendees will learn the advantages of peer led groups that address unshared reality especially on their effectiveness in acute hospital settings. Presenters will be objective while identifying challenges and room for growth. As a collective all involved will consider why these approaches are valuable as they also explore how this approach can be improved upon for future efforts.

Speakers

Michal Ditkoff

Michal Ditkoff (they/them) is a student at Brandeis University and graduate of Brookline High School (class of 2023). Currently, they are on the Wildflower Alliance Discord Moderation Team, focusing on online peer-support offerings. They have been an advocate for the mental health... Read More →

Abaigeal (Abbe) Duke

Recovery Specialist & Trainer Supervisor, OnTrackNY/CPI/ NYSPI

Abbe Duke(she,her,hers) is the Recovery Specialist & Trainer Supervisor at OnTrackNY. Abbe is a long time Peer Specialist who has worked in a variety of settings throughout New York State’s mental health system. Operating from perspectives of liberation and systems transformation... Read More →

Elise Diamond

Recovery Specialist & Trainer, OnTrackNY/ CPI/ NYSPI

Elise Diamond (they/them/theirs) is a Recovery Specialist & Trainer at OnTrackNY. Elise is mostly a gardener, but has also been a Peer Specialist and trainer for awhile. They spend a lot of time thinking about healing and liberation, and they’d probably like to talk about that with... Read More →

Claudia Wilson, MSW, MFA

Coordinator of Online Alt2Su Supports, Wildflower Alliance

Claudia Wilson is a Black, Trans writer and peer-supporter from Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. They studied Social Work and Black Literature in college and earned their MFA from UMASS Amherst. Their work lives at the intersections of identity, memory, and becoming—and is deeply rooted... Read More →

Patrick Kaufmann, CPSS, CPRC, BS

Peer Support Specialist, Recovery Institute of Southwest Michigan, Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital

Patrick Kaufmann works at Recovery Institute of Southwest Michigan, an organization that contracts with Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital. He applies his first-hand experience to connect with patients not only having been hospitalized there long term but also specifically as a voice... Read More →

Shannon Kaufmann, CPSS, ITE

CEO, Wellness Concepts

Shannon Kaufmann is a peer support who has utilized peer experience to lead a wellness center, create a healing from trauma program, and spearhead a statewide project that brought peer support into the psychiatric hospitals for the first time. She was the recipient of the Peer of... Read More →

Friday November 6, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

3:30pm EST

Disalienation as System Change: Relational and Community Approaches to Recovery (Virtual Only)

Friday November 6, 2026 3:30pm - 4:45pm EST

Virtual Room

Disalienation as System Change: Relational and Community Approaches to Recovery

3:30-4:15pm Alienation, Trauma, and the Voice That Speaks: Understanding Psychosis Spectrum Experiences Through a Social-Relational Lens - Carina A. Iati, PsyD, Jeannie Bass, CPS
4:15-4:45pm Housing as Key to Social Connections and Improved Health - Joël Doty, MA, MBA

Alienation, Trauma, and the Voice That Speaks: Understanding Psychosis Spectrum Experiences Through a Social-Relational Lens - Carina A. Iati, PsyD, Jeannie Bass, CPS
Research consistently shows that psychosis spectrum experiences are not distributed randomly across society — they emerge disproportionately among people who have experienced the most profound forms of social rupture: poverty, racism, displacement, and abuse. Not because these populations are inherently more “at risk,” but because alienation, disconnection, and powerlessness are among the most potent incubators of extreme states.This presentation draws on the Reframing Psychosis Spectrum Experiences curriculum to argue that destigmatizing psychosis is not merely a clinical or linguistic act — it is a political and relational one. When we stop asking “what is wrong with this person?” and begin asking “what happened to this person, and in what world did this experience make sense?”, we align ourselves with the disalienating tradition that ISPS-US has long upheld.This presentation is shaped equally by clinical knowledge and lived-experience wisdom. Presenters will speak from direct experience of how social alienation — including within psychiatric systems — shapes the experience of psychosis and the possibility of recovery. That perspective grounds the curriculum's trauma-informed, socially-aware framework throughout, and informs the presenters' shared argument that meaning-centered, community-embedded care is not merely a clinical alternative — it is an act of social repair.

Housing as Key to Social Connections and Improved Health - Joël Doty, MA, MBA
Most housing models are not designed to facilitate socializing withpeople who are neuro-typical. We know psychosis and other mental health challenges are unique to the individual as is treatment and coping options. However, the need for human connection is universal. Rather than isolate from the general community, this presentation proposes integrating people with mental health differences into the community with an intentional housing model that facilitates understanding, kindness and friendship.

Speakers

Ruben Valle, PhD

Carina A. Iati, PsyD

Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Carina A. Iati, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in psychosis spectrum experiences, complex trauma, and the unique needs of transitional age youth. She earned her doctorate from Indiana State University and completed advanced training at the University of Massachusetts Medical School/Worcester... Read More →

Jeannie Bass, CPS

Director of Peer Support, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Jeannie Bass, CPS, is a Certified Peer Specialist with over a decade of experience providing peer support in the public sector, community, and private mental health settings. She is a recognized leader in the international Hearing Voices Movement. Jeannie brings her lived experience... Read More →

Joël Doty, MA, MBA

Director, Community Village Group

Joël is the founder of the organization Advocates for Supportive Housing and the director of the non-profit, Community Village Group in Ann Arbor, MI. She is the mother of an adult child with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She and her group are primarily senior citizens who worry... Read More →

Friday November 6, 2026 3:30pm - 4:45pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

12:00pm EST

Virtual Meet & Greet with Ellenhorn

Saturday November 7, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST

Virtual Room

Join us for a meet and greet with conference sponsors Ellenhorn!

Saturday November 7, 2026 12:00pm - 1:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Meet & Greet, Virtual Only

1:30pm EST

Three People, One Lineage: Psychosis, Social Fracture, and What Healing Actually Requires - A Collaborative Lived Experience Panel in Three Voices (Virtual Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST

Virtual Room

This panel brings together three Indian presenters, one in the British diaspora, two based in India, spanning three decades of age. Two have lived inside psychosis and emerged with something to say about the world that produced it. All three work with clients who experience psychosis, and all three carry an intimate understanding of what it costs to put these experiences into words: the shame, the judgement, and the particular difficulty of voicing what has so often been used against you.

Acquilin (AJ) speaks as an early-career counsellor working with clients experiencing psychosis in India, drawing on an intersectional, trans-inclusive feminist lens to help their clients move away from carceral, colonial mental health systems towards supportive, relational care & stability. They will speak to how mental healthcare inaccessibility, poor cultural sensitivity training amongst service providers, and practices that heighten epistemic injustice, emerge in unexpected ways in the multicultural landscape of India.

Anuckriti (Anu) speaks as a service user and a practising counsellor in India, bringing lived experience of repeated psychotic episodes within a system that repeatedly failed them, alongside the parallel experience of holding space for clients navigating the same terrain.

Neelam (Neels) speaks as a British-Indian lived experience practitioner whose distress was rooted in the intergenerational trauma of Partition, childhood abuse, cultural dislocation, and nearly four decades of misdiagnosis and being ‘bounced’ around within the UK mental health system, before finally gaining access to a therapeutic community and the relational practice model, after 30 years of prescribed medications and traumatic interventions.

What connects these three voices is not a shared diagnosis but a shared question: what are the social conditions that produce distress, and what did it actually take to begin to heal? Together, they trace how psychosis does not happen to individuals in isolation, but within cultures, within histories, within systems of race, gender, caste, and colonial inheritance. Each narrative illustrates how dominant mental health systems, regardless of the country in which they reside, have deepened alienation rather than addressed it: through diagnostic reductionism, cultural ignorance, stigma, marginalisation, care & diagnostic inaccessibility, and the exclusion of those whose suffering does not conform to Western clinical frameworks. Yet the harm has rarely come from systems alone. All three presenters speak to the particular wound inflicted by the people closest to them: friends who blocked contact after a psychotic episode, family members who demanded normal behaviour in the midst of crisis, communities who whispered the word “unstable” and mental health practitioners who shunned the prospect of working with marginalized populations.

This social stigma, operating within families, friendships, workplaces, and care spaces, is not a backdrop to these stories, but a central force within them. It prolongs suffering, fractures relationships that might otherwise offer repair, and leaves people carrying shame and self-blame long after symptoms have receded. The panellists speak honestly about the lasting weight of that judgement, and about what it meant, in contrast, to encounter even one person who did not flinch. Drawing on their own experiences and those of clients and peers, the panellists explore what genuine disalienation has looked like in practice: the family member who laughed along rather than recoiled; the trainee counsellor who stayed present with a dual-diagnosed or complex client when no one else would; the Therapeutic Community that offered peer support, members who for the first time held the experience of becoming known, rather than processed; members who had someone to talk to who did not dismiss them, but made them feel seen and heard, thereby reducing the loneliness in the episodes they experienced; members who were able to hold each other ‘in the moment’. This enabled them to unravel the many layers that had manifested over the years, and help them to work through their challenging behaviours and maladaptive coping strategies.

For the first time, they were not being ‘done to’ by professionals who were trying to “fix” their “illness”. Each story points toward the same conclusion: healing is not something done to a person. It is something built relationally between people. This panel speaks directly to the conference theme. Psychosis, as these three lives demonstrate, is an expression of society's fractures, of Partition's ungrieved losses, of the violence done to marginalised communities, of the burnout and moral injury that fall on those who care without adequate support. Recovery, where it has come, has arrived not through corrected diagnoses or optimised medication regimens, but through relational repair: being seen across difference, trusted across fear, and held inside communities that refused to let them disappear. The panel will present in three sequential voices, followed by open dialogue with the audience. It is designed to be accessible to all experiences (i.e. clinicians, researchers, people with lived experience, family members, and advocates) and aims to leave participants with a transformed understanding of what psychosis is, where it comes from, and what it asks of all of us.

Speakers

Neelam Khawani-Connett, BA (Hons), IGA

Keynote Speaker; TC Specialist; CCQI Assessor; Lived Experience Practitioner; Group Supervisor and Facilitator; International Trainer, Growing Better Lives CIC; Mosaic TC; Royal College of Psychiatrists; The Consortium for Therapeutic Communities (TCTC); Polyfonia (formerly INDTC-RP)

Neels is a Psychologist, Psychotherapist, and Lived Experience Practitioner with specialist expertise in Therapeutic Communities (TCs), group therapy, and relational care. She works internationally delivering training, supervision, and consultancy across mental health, homelessness... Read More →

Acquilin John, MSc

Founder, Counselling Psychologist; Consultant Psychologist & Psychotherapist; Member, As We Find It; The Alternative Story; Mosaic (Academic Therapeutic Community)

Acquilin (they/xe) is a queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled advocate for non-carceral mental health care and an anti-capitalist, anti-caste, anti-colonial, anti-majoritarian, anti-sanist voice for systemic change. They are an early-career counseling psychologist, psychotherapist... Read More →

Anuckriti Garg, BA, MSW

Founder, Therapist; Member; Consultant EAP Counselor; Associate Therapist; Consultant Counselor, Therapy with Anuckriti; Mosaic; 1to1help.net; The Weird Therapist; Evergro

Anuckriti (she/they) is a queer-identifying neurodivergent therapist with more than three years ofexperience. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Psychology and has a post graduate in Social Work specialising in Mental Health from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. In her work... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

3:00pm EST

The Right to Make Meaning: Mysticism, Art, Culture, and Agency (Virtual Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST

Virtual Room

The Right to Make Meaning: Mysticism, Art, Culture, and Agency

3-4pm The Shape of Air: Colonial Psychiatry, Medication Violence, and Film as Witness - Jennifer Abbott
4-4:30pm Reframing Mysticism: An Ethic of Agency and the Other in Psychosis - Jacob Sirkisoon Prescott, LMSW

The Shape of Air: Colonial Psychiatry, Medication Violence, and Film as Witness - Jennifer Abbott
The Shape of Air is a feature documentary in development by award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Abbott, centring her son — a remarkable Cree artist treated for schizophrenia who died in 2025 from the side-effects of a state-mandated psychiatric medication. This presentation combines film footage, animated artwork, and personal testimony to trace the violence at the intersection of colonization and psychiatry, asking how dominant mental health systems function as instruments of ongoing colonial dispossession. At the heart of the film is Weston's own visual art — animated throughout the documentary, exerting pressure on the legal and psychiatric processes that governed his life — as the one space those systems could neither classify nor confine, and the only realm in which he remained fully sovereign. Freed from the demand to explain or conclude, art is proposed here not as illustration but as witness: capable of holding what institutional language has spent centuries trying to erase. Attendees will be invited to consider the film as both evidence and intervention, and to explore opportunities to participate in or support its production.

Reframing Mysticism: An Ethic of Agency and the Other in Psychosis - Jacob Sirkisoon Prescott, LMSW
This presentation will offer a critical analysis of mystical conceptualizations of psychosis, while utilizing the colloquially named “AI Psychosis” to argue the importance of an individual’s relationship to Lacan’s Other in recovery. As the ex-patient movement has gained momentum in Europe and the United States, many first-person accounts of psychosis have been uplifted, along with a mystical reframing of the reductionist, traditional, psychiatric etiologies of extreme states. While spiritual accounts of psychosis have the capacity to empower many in recovery, fetishizing interpretations of mysticism’s impact hazard overshadowing the importance of centering an individual’s lived experience of the Other. Drawing from Amy Hollywood and Brett Fimiani, I will establish an intra-psychic structural link between mysticism and psychosis, emphasize the sociological context of “AI psychosis”, and consequently advocate for a treatment ethic that centers the person(s) right to co-construct an individualized narrative of struggle.

Speakers

Jennifer Abbott

Writer/Director (film), Flying Eye Productions

Sundance award-winning filmmaker and media artist Jennifer Abbott creates rigorously crafted, politically engaged works—spanning documentary cinema, virtual reality, and installation—that disrupt dominant narratives, upend the status quo, and invite new ways of seeing. Best known... Read More →

Jacob Sirkisoon Prescott, LMSW

Postgraduate Psychotherapist and Constellations Operations Manager, Greene Clinic

Jacob is a social worker and psychotherapist who uses a psychodynamic framework to work with addiction, psychosis, and extreme states. They have a wide range of experience in hospital, non-profit and peer centered settings. Jacob graduated from Smith College’s School of Social Work... Read More →

Saturday November 7, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

5:00pm EST

The Clinician in the Room: Projection, Power, and Moral Injury in Psychosis Care (Virtual Only)

Saturday November 7, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm EST

Virtual Room

The Clinician in the Room: Projection, Power, and Moral Injury in Psychosis Care

5-5:30pm Unrecognized and Untreated: Moral Injury Associated With Psychiatric Hospitalization - James Black, MD PhD, Wendy Haight, PhD
5:30-6pm Whose Insight Is it Anyway? Therapist Projection and the Folly of Targeting Anosognosia - Lionel Wininger, PhD

Unrecognized and Untreated: Moral Injury Associated With Psychiatric Hospitalization - James Black, MD PhD, Wendy Haight, PhD
Moral injury (MI) is the lasting distress caused by violations of core ethical values. It affects combat veterans, healthcare workers, and other populations, significantly increasing suffering, dysfunction, and suicide risk. Psychiatric hospitalization can violate core ethical values MI in many ways and with lasting harm, yet moral injury remains unstudied despite in both patients and clinicians. MI is associated with moral cognition and emotions, whereas PTSD is associated with danger and fear, and different brain mechanisms are involved.We describe MI in 32 hospitalized patients with severe mental illness. While some MI stemmed from behaviors during illness or experiences of stigma, the hospital experience itself frequently caused profound ethical violations: involuntary holds, physical restraints, forced medication, and civil commitment have traumatized patients, who perceived these as assaults on dignity and autonomy. Healthcare professionals administering coercive treatments also suffer MI, caught between therapeutic duties and causing harm.Patients experienced lasting distress from loss of bodily autonomy, betrayal by trusted clinicians, challenges to identity, and powerlessness. Some patients showed limited distress regarding violations, revealing MI's heterogeneity among people with different brains and experiences. Despite the apparently high prevalence and severity, psychiatric institutions neither recognize nor treat MI in patients or staff.This case series demonstrates that: (1) psychiatric hospitalization frequently inflicts MI through necessary but coercive care; (2) this can cause severe, unaddressed suffering; (3) both patients and professionals can be deeply affected; and (4) current practice ignores the ethical dimension of trauma. These findings establish an urgent need for developing evidence-based methods for recognizing and treating moral injury in a psychiatric hospital.

Whose Insight Is it Anyway? Therapist Projection and the Folly of Targeting Anosognosia - Lionel Wininger, PhD
The concept of insight occupies a central role in psychosis treatment, yet its clinical meaning is rarely examined with the scrutiny it deserves. This presentation draws on psychoanalytic frameworks to examine two underexplored dimensions of the therapist-patient relationship in psychosis care: 1) psychological contagion, the unconscious fear therapists harbor about being "infected" by severe mental states; and 2) the clinical risks of targeting anosognosia as a treatment goal when therapist and patient unknowingly collude around harmful, simplistic, or stigmatized narratives of psychosis.

Speakers

Lionel Wininger, PhD

Chief Clinical Psychologist, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota

Lionel Wininger is the Chief Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, and his BA at Brandeis... Read More →

James Black, MD, PhD

Hospital Psychiatry, University of Minnesota

James Black, MD, PhD has been a hospital psychiatrist for about 30 years. He previously conducted neuroscience research, but he has recently focused on climate change and ethics.

Wendy Haight, PhD

Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota

Wendy Haight, PhD is an emeritus professor of Social Work at the University of Minnesota, with a career focused on child welfare, including moral injury and child welfare systems in Asia, Africa, and the US. She is the author of 13 academic books and numerous journal articles.

Saturday November 7, 2026 5:00pm - 6:00pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

11:00am EST

Making Meaning of Psychosis: Phenomenology and Lived Experience (Virtual Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm EST

Virtual Room

Making Meaning of Psychosis: Phenomenology and Lived Experience

11-11:30pm The Psychological Greenhouse: A Phenomenological Framework for Understanding Psychosis-like Experience and Recovery - Wenmao Ma, Xinru Yi
11:30-12pm The Importance of Diversifying Causation Beliefs in Support Groups for Psychosis - Timothy C Dreby, MEd, LMFT

The Psychological Greenhouse: A Phenomenological Framework for Understanding Psychosis-like Experience and Recovery - Wenmao Ma, Xinru Yi
This presentation introduces the Psychological Greenhouse framework as a phenomenological model for understanding psychosis-like experiences. The model conceptualizes these experiences as meaning-saturated and contextually organized processes that emerge within intensified experiential environments shaped by relational, emotional, and environmental factors. Rather than interpreting psychosis solely as symptom pathology, this framework emphasizes the dynamic construction of subjective meaning and experiential organization. The presentation situates this model within psychological and social approaches to psychosis, highlighting its implications for recovery-oriented understanding and clinical practice.

The Importance of Diversifying Causation Beliefs in Support Groups for Psychosis - Timothy C Dreby, MEd, LMFT
One of the greatest questions I dealt with when I was experiencing psychosis was: why is this happening me? As a practitioner running professioanal groups in spaces where I have fought to make it okay to directly share stories and common experiences that happen during psychosis, I have found that exploring this question has yeilded diverse responses. I have often found that studying the different experiences of others to enable me to diversify the answers to this question: why is this happening? When I struggled as a patient I had a political explaination: I was being gangstalked by a black market mafia secret society in which the people closest to me were active. Now as a practitioner I am able to listen to others and hear in their stories a wide variety of answers: political, spiritual, traumatic, psychological, scientific, and artistic. Now that I have been doing this for eighteen years, come and learn explanations I have learned from considering my own and other peoples experiences.

Speakers

Wenmao Ma

Product Manager, Changsha Sirui Kangning Technology Co., Ltd.

Wenmao Ma is a mental health advocate, lived experience researcher, and peer support practitioner from China. Over the past decade, he has been actively involved in promoting recovery-oriented mental health services, self-advocacy, and social inclusion for people with lived experience... Read More →

Xinru Yi

Product Manager, Changsha Sirui Kangning Technology Co., Ltd.

Xinru Yi is a lived experience mental health advocate, researcher, and digital mental health practitioner. He has long been engaged in mental health recovery, lived experience research, and theoretical development. He developed the “Psychological Greenhouse” conceptual framework... Read More →

TImothy C Dreby, MEd, LMFT

Lead Rehabilitation Counselor, Alameda Health System

Tim Dreby is a psychotherapist in private practice and the award-winning author of a memoir about surviving a schizophrenia diagnosis. He has been employed in Oakland, CA over the last twenty-four years at Alameda Health System in the Department of Outpatient Psychiatry at Highland... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 11:00am - 12:00pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

1:30pm EST

Student Experiences of Psychosis: Cultural Alienation, Meaning-Making, and Systems of Care (Virtual Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST

Virtual Room

Student Experiences of Psychosis: Cultural Alienation, Meaning-Making, and Systems of Care

1:30-2pm The Storm That Helps You Notice How Far You Are From Land: International Students Whose Extreme Experiences Helped Us to Identify and Address Forms of Social and Cultural Alienation - Olivia Wills
2-2:30pm Countertransference and Containment in Acute Response Strategies for Students Presenting With Psychosis in University Residence Hall Contexts - Neil Haran, MS, Rachel Rahman, BA

The Storm That Helps You Notice How Far You Are From Land: International Students Whose Extreme Experiences Helped Us to Identify and Address Forms of Social and Cultural Alienation - Olivia Wills
In this presentation, I (a therapist in a college counseling center) will look at the work that two international college students and I did to unpack their extreme experiences. For these two international students, the extreme experiences were calling attention to alienation from aspects of self and community that had occurred as a part of their move/immigration to the United States. Unpacking the experiences invited critical meaning making and potentially, re-connection to what vitalized these two incredible individuals. In one case, we will reach back two layers of immigration in order for the client to make meaning of his choices during the extreme experience; he will identify a strong urge to connect back to a “natural self” that was polluted in his desire to connect to American Blackness, his desire to connect with peers in a large American community. This “pollution” or process of contortion led to him feeling even more isolated, and to him craving connection, at the end of four years. In the other case, a student will meet her darkest and most violent sounding voice yet and this voice, we learn together, was beckoning her home to her family and to a version of community and professional success that she had left behind in her native country. (Clients have signed consent, but information will be de-identified).

Countertransference and Containment in Acute Response Strategies for Students Presenting With Psychosis in University Residence Hall Contexts - Neil Haran, MS, Rachel Rahman, BA
The literature on best practices for crisis response for psychosis largely revolves around psychiatric/medical, emergency medical service provision, or law enforcement contexts. However, for the majority of American residential college students experiencing crises involving psychosis, their first responders are likely non-clinical university staff such as administrators or resident assistants, many of whom do not have specific training, academic backgrounds, or routine interactions with individuals experiencing psychosis. The absence of this background or training may lend itself to worse quality of care and escalatory response strategies by way of service-providers’ sense of unpreparedness and emotional dysregulation; this may further result in negative emotional contagion and escalation/agitation in service user populations during interventions. These consequences are associated with higher rates of coercive use of force and involuntary hospitalization for service users. Additionally, available mental health first aid training(s) may provide unrealistic depictions of individuals experiencing psychosis and emphasize unilateral control of the individual in crisis as the stated goal of intervention rather than service-provider self-regulation and management. In this presentation, we propose that psychoeducational training which emphasizes a mechanistic and empathetic understanding of psychosis and agitation, as well containment of both service provider and service user psychological states can be useful to accomplish the best outcomes for both service users and responding service providers. These outcomes will ideally reduce coercive hospitalizations and interactions with institutional entities, and drive better outcomes and service-user experience across the full continuum of care.

Speakers

Olivia Wills, MSW, LCSW

Therapist, University of Southern California, Counseling Center

Olivia Wills, MSW, LCSW, (she/her) received her undergraduate degree from PrincetonUniversity and her Master of Social Work from the University of Chicago. She currentlyworks as clinical faculty at a university counseling center where she provides supervisionand consultation on working... Read More →

Rachel Rahman, BA

Incident Response Team Administrator, New York University

Rachel Rahman is a first-year Master’s student in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University and an Incident Response Team Administrator at New York University, where she provides non-clinical, on-site psychosocial crisis response within university residence halls... Read More →

Neil Haran, MS

Incident Response Team Administrator, New York University

Neil Haran is an Incident Response Team Administrator at New York University where he conducts rapid, on-site psychosocial crisis responses within university residence halls. His academic background is in clinical psychology and he has worked as a graduate student researcher on projects... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 1:30pm - 2:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only

3:00pm EST

Expanding Psychosis Care: Integrating Creativity and Community (Virtual Only)

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST

Virtual Room

Expanding Psychosis Care: Integrating Creativity and Community

3-3:45pm Integrating Evidence and Meaning: Rethinking Psychosis Care through Clinical, Creative and Lived Experience Perspectives - Lorna Collins, PhD, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA, Anthony David, PhD, Roxana Baiasu, PhD, SFHEA
3:45-4:15pm: Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis - Boglarka Hardy

Integrating Evidence and Meaning: Rethinking Psychosis Care through Clinical, Creative and Lived Experience Perspectives - Lorna Collins, PhD, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA, Anthony David, PhD, Roxana Baiasu, PhD, SFHEA
This interdisciplinary panel brings together lived experience, clinical and academic expertise, creative and philosophical perspectives to explore how people living with psychosis can receive holistic, responsive care. It focuses on the integration and interactions of medication and standard evidence-based therapies with creative practices such as art and writing, exploring how these modalities can influence each other and shape recovery. Drawing on clinical expertise as well as lived experience, the panel explores the complex realities of pharmacological treatment (considering its challenges and benefits) and how creative art practices can complement and reframe clinical care. The panel will refer to lived experiences of engaging with psychopharmacology alongside arts on prescription and creative health practices, in the context of receiving treatment for acute psychosis. These inquiries are further pursued through ethical and phenomenological considerations of fundamental questions about meaning, values, and person-centred approaches in mental health.

Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis - Boglarka Hardy
Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis In 1953, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari initiated an annual theatrical performance at La Borde Clinic in France. Patients, psychiatrists, nurses, gardeners, and administrative staff rehearsed and performed together. This was not simply an artistic activity. It was the treatment.The underlying idea was disalienation: the belief that psychosis is not only an individual disorder but also a rupture of the social link, and that recovery requires collective practices capable of rebuilding relationships, shared meaning, and a sense of belonging.Today, such practices have almost disappeared from mainstream psychiatry and have become rare even within alternative mental health institutions. Yet comparable approaches may still be recognised in other settings, including psychodrama, bibliotherapy, music groups, film discussion groups, peer storytelling, and community arts initiatives.Drawing on the theoretical framework of French institutional psychotherapy, this presentation examines six currently operating alternative mental health institutions across five European countries: La Borde (France), Soteria Berlin (Germany), Klinik Arlesheim (Switzerland), DSM Trieste (Italy), and Stichting Weerklank and Centrum de Brouwerij (the Netherlands). Each has developed distinct collective practices aimed at counteracting isolation and rebuilding social connectedness.Building on this comparative analysis, the presentation asks three questions: Which collective cultural practices are capable of performing the disalienating function that theatre performed at La Borde? What distinguishes genuinely disalienating practices from activities that are merely recreational or occupational? And what would it take for such practices to regain a central place within contemporary psychiatry?

Speakers

Boglarka Hardy

Private practice as a psychologist., Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary

Boglarka Hardy graduated from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary, in 2011. She earned a Master’s degree in Hungarian Language and Literature, as well as a Master’s degree in Comparative Literary History and Cultural Studies (English and American Literature... Read More →

Dr Lorna Collins, PhD, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA

Director and Founder, A Creative Transformation, U.K.

Dr Lorna Collins, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA is a writer, artist, award winning creative consultant and educator. She has published articles and books on mad philosophy, hallucinations, phenomenology, aesthetics, French philosophy and children’s fiction. Lorna lives with organic psychosis... Read More →

Dr Roxana Baiasu, PhD

Assistant Professor, Programme Lead of the Online MSc Mental Health, Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, Affiliate of the Institute for Data and Artificial Intelligence (IDAI), University of Birmingham

Dr. Roxana Baiasu is Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham, Institute for Mental Health and School of Psychology, and the Programme Director of the Online MSc Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, UK. Roxana’s academic interests include the philosophy of mental... Read More →

Anthony David, PhD

Professor of Mental Health at University College London, Division of Psychiatry, Director of UCL Institute of Mental Health, Honorary Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the National Hospital for Neurology, UCLH Foundation NHS Trust., Division of Psychiatry, University College London, U.K.

Tony David has been Professor of Mental Health at University College London, Division of Psychiatry since 2018, as well as Honorary Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the National Hospital for Neurology, UCLH Foundation NHS Trust. He led UCL’s successful application for a Mental Health... Read More →

Sunday November 8, 2026 3:00pm - 4:30pm EST
Virtual Room

Breakout Session, Virtual Only