Announcing: podcast conversations about what works in crisis care and mental health systems change
Interviews with the believables, to ask 'what do we need to do, and how can we do it?'
Hey there!
Psych Crisis now has a podcast!
Why?
There are really only two questions that matter in the context of psychcrisis.org’s work:
What do we need to do to help people having a mental health crisis survive, recover and flourish?
How do we change and develop the systems that support (1)?
Surveying the landscape of content roughly of the format ‘people having conversations about the mental health system’, there are a lot of fancy qualifications, and a lot of buzzwords–but it seems to be lacking a few things I love–concrete practicality, thorough investigation of what worked in the past, and believability–taking advice from people who have had success in the past, and have good explanations when asked.
(I have listened to many hours of this, uh, bullshit so you don’t have to, dear reader. You can thank me later :P)
Thus was born the Psych Crisis podcast–currently tentatively named ‘Changing Crisis Care’. I’ve hunted down people who are very ‘believable’--have had repeated, obvious success helping people with mental health crises, or who have tried to make changes to the system, and interrogated them, roughly, to find out what worked and why (they’ve thus far been very polite about my interrogation!).
Hence, my first three podcast guests:
Joy Hibbins, from Suicide Crisis UK. I might be Joy’s No.1 fan; frequent readers of this newsletter will recognise her name from the dozens of times I effusively mention it. She created a crisis service that was structured the way she needed it to be to help people the way she felt she needed to (based on her own experiences of suicidal crises), and has had an astonishing track record, with zero suicides amongst her clients in the decade her service has been running. Her service operates out of a different mindset to the ones normally used in mental health, and she goes into that in our interview. I appreciate how humane and real her work is–no technical, alienating jargon used.
Jackie Huber, a Sydney ED psychiatrist. Most ED psychiatrists oversee sedation, restraint, and putting people in hospital against their will (5150, mental health act sectioning). Jackie’s ED does some of that still, but what I admire is her focus on interpersonal relationships, kindness, and emotional presence with the people who come into her ED. We talk about EDs as mental health crisis care and discuss alternatives, as well as systematising the training of subtle emotional skills. She came highly recommended by a good friend who was her colleague, so I was glad to interview Jackie.
Pablo Sadler, director of the NYC Parachute Project. In this conversation, Pablo and I talk about implementation, and systems change. He was one of the leaders of an ambitious project to bring relational crisis response to the homes of people experiencing psychosis in NYC. This was a big paradigm shift they tried to bring about, working entirely within the public health system. We talk about working within complex administrations, working with grants, and working on paradigm shifts. I was inspired by Parachute’s Working Paper, published as a retrospective after the project pilot wrapped up, so I was very glad to talk to Pablo.
These three episodes get the podcast off the ground, and I hope you find them as interesting as I did!
Additional podcasts will be published as new experts are found; if there’s someone you think I should interview, please recommend them. Topics that could be discussed:
Helping multiple people successfully recover from psychosis
Recruiting and training mental health workers, particularly while maintaining a compassionate culture
Restructuring a working crisis system
Measuring how effective a service is (or, improving the measurement system).
Personally recovering from intense suicidality, mania or psychosis, and now flourishing
Accomplishing something in the political arena (e.g. legalising a kind of treatment)
The podcast is currently available on Spotify. Enjoy!
Check out these notes on the first episode, by Pranab:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YuyWgCsnxEXwn_tmGZvSSzsw-WKvsfoUeaO_N89FVTc/edit