Update for the Month of March 2024

by Board President Al Galves

 

 

New Board Members

We have two new Board members: Dina Tyler in California and Kristina “KK” Kapp in Ohio.

Dina Tyler is an individual and family counselor in private practice. She specializes in extreme states of consciousness often labeled as psychosis or mania. Using breathwork, she trains family members, supporters, and providers to compassionately hold space for intense emotions and extreme states, and gain insight into altered states of consciousness. She also consults with community mental health organizations to develop innovative programs through training on the integration of staff with personal lived experience into clinical teams and creating crisis response alternatives to police involvement and psychiatric institutionalization.

After her own experience with oppression and trauma in the mental health system, Dina was inspired to help others through promoting compassionate, human rights-based alternative approaches and was nationally recognized as the Peer Specialist of the Year by the National Council for Behavioral Health in 2015.

Dina is an organizer of Mad Camp, a founder of the Bay Area Hearing Voices Network, the former co-director of the Bay Area Mandala Project, the former coordinator of and counselor for Big Picture Wellness, and a former director of peer and family support services for early psychosis and bipolar programs in four counties of the Californian Bay Area. She recently gave a terrific Grand Rounds presentation at San Francisco State University’s Department of Psychiatry.

 

 Kristina Kapp, better known as KK, has created a beautiful masterpiece of the adversity with which life has presented her. She passes on the strength and wisdom that she gained through her experiences and chooses to view her disability and trauma as an opportunity to learn, grow, and raise the bar to a standard above and beyond the conventional way of thinking that neurodiversity limits who we are.

KK tapped her own well of human potential to supersede chromosomal birth defects, childhood prognoses, and expectations that she would live her life within the walls of institutions. Her compassionate humanitarian heart brought forth a spring of hope and belief in herself and others, creating the foundation on which she built her future. This has enabled her to blaze a trail and ignite a revolution in alternative workarounds, innovations, and creative development through cultivating hope, sewing seeds of empowerment, and watering them with her belief in her own and every human’s potential.

KK has worked in behavioral health, disability justice, and advocacy for 22 years as an activist and ambassador. In addition to serving as the chair of Ohio’s Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) and the vice president of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), she is honored to serve on the Board of Directors of Disability Rights Ohio (DRO), the Steering Committee of Liberators for Justice (L4J), and the Mental Health Subcommittee of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL). She proudly lives her life out loud without hesitation.

Our Working Board

As you all know, we are limping along financially. That means we depend on our Board members to do much of our work.

Susan Musante is our point person for Judi’s Room, our main way of spreading the word to the general public. She works with Susan Fitzmaurice from I Love You, Lead On to set up the programs, get the publicity out, and facilitate the meetings.

On top of taking our minutes and preparing our monthly financial reports, Jim Gottstein directs our effort to build on the momentum created by the October 2021 International Peer Respite/Soteria Summit and is leading our effort to recruit and train volunteers to operate the MindFreedom Shield. Below is information on the March 19 Zoom meeting of prospective Shield volunteers.

Vesper Moore is our liaison with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery (NCMHR) as well as other groups in the movement. Vesper and Susan are the leads in our effort to obtain funds from foundations.

Shield Volunteer Recruitment Meeting on March 19th

Jim Gottstein will be meeting with prospective Shield volunteers on Tuesday, March 19th at 1 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST). The meeting is both a recruiting and training event.

We need people to serve as Shield Alert Coordinators and Shield Alert Administrators. If you’re curious about what those jobs entail and have an inkling to work on the Shield, please attend the meeting. You can register by clicking on the following Zoom link or copying the URL and pasting it into an internet browser: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErcumqqz4vG9xZp-bQQ2lJfBUpyIG9AfoJ

Judi’s Room

Our presenter next month will be Rob Wipond, journalist and author of Your Consent is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment and Abusive Guardianships. We will be hosting this event via Zoom on Wednesday, April 3rd at 6 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST). Stay tuned for a separate email containing additional details.

MindfulRights

Monirul, a MindFreedom member in Bangladesh, has launched a website called MindfulRights in order to promote human rights in various fields in Bangladesh including mental health care and to raise public awareness of related issues within the country.

Although the site is still a work in progress, it already offers educational resources such as a digital booklet that Monirul has composed to explain the United Nations’ Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care in simple terms that are easy to understand. We would like to thank Monirul for this impressive undertaking and we wish this project all the best in the future.

(Disclaimer: MindFreedom is not an author, owner, or financial sponsor of this website and booklet, and is therefore not responsible for their respective contents.)

Request

If you have ideas about how we can be more effective, more stable financially, and more helpful to our members, please share them with me by emailing me at agalves2003@comcast.net or calling me at 1-575-571-3105.

Donations

If you would like to donate to MindFreedom you can do so by clicking on this link or by sending a check to MindFreedom International at PO Box 11284, Eugene, OR 97440, USA.