I’m a mad, queer, and disabled advocate, facilitator, and writer of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish heritage.

My goals are to educate about the harm caused in the name of mental health care, and to put forth a new paradigm of what it means to care. 

My work is driven and informed by my own lived experiences, as well as the experiences of my parents, who were both diagnosed with serious mental illness and died young.

A defining event in my life was when the State took away my mother’s right to parent when I was just five years old. This decision broke her, and us. I grapple with the ongoing impacts on my bodymind, over 40 years later.

Sadly, my story is nowhere near obsolete. To this day, as many as half of parents with psychosocial disabilities will lose the right to parent their children, chiefly for reasons related to poverty and lack of access to disability supports.

After my mother’s death at age 46, I became obsessed with the idea of helping people and families to access the kind of support and information that might help them avoid the harm and suffering our family experienced. 

Since 2001, I’ve been fortunate to be a part of liberation movements created by and for mad, mentally ill, neurodivergent, and disabled people (mMIND). I’ve been with them in fierce solidarity ever since.

In all of my work, I seek to elevate the perspectives of lived experience — people who possess invaluable wisdom and insights on the public policies and practices that directly impact them, but whose voices are still too rarely heard in the public conversation on mental health.

For twenty years, my focus in writing, education, and advocacy has been the abolition of all forms of coercion and involuntary intervention in mental health care. 

I study the policies and practices of the last half-century that continue to haunt us today in America, and I uplift ideas and innovations led by people with lived experiences globally that reflect a more compassionate, consent-based, public health and human rights-based approach to support and care. 

I’m also interested in the influence of AI and tech on mental health, the intersections between menopause and psychosocial disability, peer supported approaches for altered states/psychosis, the medicalization of psychedelics, undoing sanism, and social justice approaches to suicide prevention and care.

My reported memoir-in-progress, NONCOMPLIANT, weaves our family’s narrative alongside the larger history of mental health care in America, making an urgent case for abolition of harmful, coercive practices and institutions.