Transforming Our Current Mental Health Infrastructure with Sascha Altman DuBrul

Jo & JJ Go Mental

This week, Jo and J.J. welcome Sascha Altman DuBrul, Writer, Educator, Coach, Counselor, and Co-Founder of the Icarus Project. Sascha shares how his own experience with mental health and time in a psychiatric hospital led him to realize that the traditional mental health space had a lot of frailties and faults, and brought him to his life’s mission to bring like minded people together to start to get the education and training they would need to create lasting change. He talks about his decision to also add in traditional clinical education and why that was beneficial and explains the need for communities to come together to empower each other. He and Jo and J.J. also discuss how social and political context must be talked about to understand mental health.

Takeaway:

[2:38] Sascha is a writer and educator and has facilitated workshops for more than two decades. He is part of a growing movement to provide an alternative mental health infrastructure.

[3:34] To him, mental health is the basis of how we relate to ourselves and others out in the world. Sascha’s mission is to help us see our emotional sensitivities as a superpower and less as a burden. He knows firsthand that we can thrive rather than just survive.

[6:02] When Sascha was 18 years old, he had a psychotic break, was locked up in a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was just in his late 20’s and harbored all these questions about his treatment and the system itself.

[8:19] Sascha knew there was more than just what his doctors were telling him and the information he was getting from the mainstream medical world. This led him to explore why culture and society are so influenced by politics and funding, and how the society we live in is crazy, making people feel insane for questioning the status quo.

[11:40] One of the foundational tenets of Sascha’s work is the power of validation and knowing you aren’t alone. Many of the anti-stigma campaigns are funded by the pharmaceutical industry, but we need real people stepping up as peers to get real about their challenges to help others feel safe in being vulnerable.

[15:33] Having a sense of identity is so important. When we don’t know who we are, we can fall prey more easily to the dominant ideology of society without really thinking for ourselves.

[21:08] Sascha discusses the multiple training modalities he has done including Internal Family Systems, and how it complements his education both from Hunter College School of Social Work and Silverman School of Social Work. Working in the public mental health system in New York City he saw that there was so little talk about actual mental health, and people shied away from talking about their own lived experience. He also saw that helpers get paid very little and working in the system is extremely stressful, thankless, and challenging.

[26:13] The Peer Movement is a radical way to transform the system and train people that part of their job is self-disclosure.

[28:42] Sascha talks with J.J. and Jo about having connections inside the system but maintaining ourselves outside the system through training and education. You can get a clinical degree, but it’s important that the people that have had the lived experience are getting heard. Otherwise, there are blind spots in professional treatment that go unaddressed.

[35:18] The current mental health system is too old and needs to be rebuilt. Sascha discusses the global mental health movement and how both from top-down and from the bottom up, there are glaring issues that include Western ways of thinking petrochemical companies and Big Pharma are our only saviors.

[42:55] What really increases mental health? Money and resources, not just doing one type of therapy. We need to redistribute resources to people in the world, so people are able to take care of themselves first on a basic human needs level.

[48:42] It takes a lot of energy to want to hurt or harm oneself, and these are very energetic symptoms. Once redirected in a healthy way, it can possibly be a transition to putting more energy into positive habits and creativity.

Connect With Us:

Joanna Denton | Dr. J.J. Kelly

Sascha

IDHA | Sascha DuBrul | TEDx