Community Care and Transformative Mental Health

Collage by Leah Pressman

For the last five months, IDHA’s Training Committee worked together to create a new and unique training series. We started with a blank page, and together we crafted a theme, honed in on specifics, and connected with incredible teachers. And now we’re thrilled to present Cultivating Community: Creating the Conditions for Care.

Our first class is this Sunday, April 24, and you can sign up for the full series or individual classes (all CE eligible!) here. To kick off the series, some of our committee members reflected on the theme and why it’s important to us.

Our prompts were: What does community mean to you? Why are you invested in it? How does community care support a transformative approach to mental health? What are you most excited about for these classes? Our responses are below!

Steven Licardi

Community means a shared investment in the growth and development of what we love. Ourselves. One another. A place. A vibe. It is a process of accountability rooted in collective liberation. To gather into community is to embrace a larger human endeavor; we are social creatures, afterall, but let us not see community as uniquely human. It is what connects us to our sentient living siblings. Plant, animal, and otherwise. Indeed, community is what an ecosystem is, a solar system, a universe. Community is the intangible magic that strings together our collective being through actionable love. I'm invested in this because I believe it is through community – the gift of seeing those around us whom we may not understand or even vibe with – that we can heal the wounds that keep us sick. 

I think we need to see mental health not as a personal, individual responsibility, but to understand that our psycho-social-physio-spiritual needs are intimately interconnected. Mental health as something that exists between bodies. If my neighbor doesn't have enough food to eat and I have a pantry full of food poised to expire, an unnecessary failure has occurred that can be alleviated by communication, humility, and community accountability. Rugged individualism has delegated our struggles to personal responsibility, has diminished our status as social creatures, and has sidestepped the nature of mental health as a concept, subject to ideological shift, rather than a thing onto itself. If we as a community wish to fundamentally transform what we mean by "mental illness", we can. And we have! If there is an unmet need in our community that has resulted in a "mental illness", we as a community can and must come together to determine how to meet that need in solidarity with our one another and with ourselves.

These classes will center the practice of building and sustaining community, and will uplift the tools necessary to take on this sacred task, including the skills of how to recognize when community is being developed and created, or being undermined. Understanding accountability as an act of love, seeing each conflict as an opportunity for co-creation and liberation, and seeing hurt and suffering as not things to be abolished, but aligned with and leveraged, even transformed as loci of joy, are all at the center of our efforts to transform and celebrate community. I'm excited, through these classes, to be building new worlds together.

Neesa Sunar

I feel that community is vital to mental health, having experienced this first-hand. During times when I feel mentally unwell, the situation is always worst when I have no one to confide in for support. I lived in a state of perpetual loneliness, until I discovered the peer community in 2014. This is when I attended the peer specialist training program at Howie the Harp Advocacy Center. Finally, I found people who understood me, people who lived by statements such as, " a diagnosis isn't a destiny," and " nothing about us without us." Discovering the peer community also gave me a mission in life: A desire to help others with mental illness in a humane way. Peer support gave me the strength to return to school to become a social worker. Eight years later, I now work as a telepath therapist for an online Clinic. I have control over my mental sufferings, and I feel I have come full circle. This was all made possible due to the power of peer support and community. 

Amy Howard

To me, community is about centering relationships and ethics. Being in community allows us to have conversations about what matters. It is about listening to each other and empowering each other so that we can connect more deeply. When we connect in this way, we can support each other to be more engaged and more accountable with one another.

Community is also about creating spaces so that we can heal one another. Through shared knowledges and wisdom, we can create a worldview that is much more inclusive and dynamic.

Loa Beckenstein

An ostensible expert in psychosis once told me that my schizoaffective diagnosis couldn’t be correct because I had, and I quote, “too much social support.” When I whined about it later, my doctor, who talks a good game about being anti-diagnosis, agreed with her. “Schizoaffective people are all very isolated,” she intoned. After my initial anger at both of them, I became so incredibly sad. Here was one person who did not believe that it was possible for crazy people to be loved, and another that didn’t believe it was possible for crazy people to be loved well, did not understand that my intense and disturbing desire to self-isolate was nowhere near as powerful as my long running weekly Shabbat with my neighbors, or being regularly sent pictures of my friend’s godchild with no expectation of response, or another friend’s insistence that we finish the reality show we’d been watching before it all began. I’m not invested in my diagnosis, but I am deeply, deeply invested in shaping a world where no one believes that being held in community and being crazy are mutually exclusive.

Leah Pressman

Leah submitted the collage at the top of this post.

Community is a vast topic that conjures many different words and images, and remains a bit abstract in my mind’s eye. This collage is my attempt to capture and express some of that using a combination of magazine clippings, water color, and doodles/notes in pen on paper. With love, Leah.