Newsroom

ISPS-US's Executive Director, Leah Giorgini, is quoted in this new article from our friends Mad in America about the WHO Mental Health Guidance Launch event earlier this month.⁠
⁠
Leah said "in the United States, we are particularly facing a rise in coercive practices with people diagnosed with psychosis, especially those who are homeless. More and more policies target these individuals and laws are being put into place to force people into involuntary treatment. The social fabric of America’s lack of welfare and support is not addressed. We at ISPS-US uphold this guidance’s demand for rights-based treatment and a focus on social determinants and supports.”⁠

Calling all Psychologists and Psychology Graduate Students!

Curious about the new Board Certification in Serious Mental Illness Psychology (provisionally affiliated with ABPP)—but unsure if it’s for you?

At ISPS-US, we believe in the power of storytelling to deepen understanding and challenge stigma and misconceptions of experiences commonly diagnosed "psychosis." Today, we’re honored to share a moving fairy tale written by ISPS-US member and HVN-USA Board Member Jeannie Bass.

Jeannie’s story, The Girl Who Listened to the Stars, offers a poetic and compassionate lens on voice hearing, acknowledging its complexity, while celebrating the strength and meaning people can find in their experiences. It’s a powerful reminder that healing comes not from silencing voices, but from reclaiming our own.

We’re thrilled to announce the theme of our 2025 Annual Conference: "Bridging the Divides: From Fragmentation to Connection in Psychosis and Society."

Join us November 7-9, 2025, at the University of Illinois Chicago and hybrid online via Zoom for a transformative gathering that invites dialogue on healing our times' personal, clinical, and social fractures.

With this announcement, the conference Call for Proposals (CFP) is also now open. Submit your proposals by June 1, 2025.

ISPS-US has written a letter to New York legislators to reject proposed expansions of involuntary commitment in the state budget. Research shows forced treatment leads to poor outcomes, including increased mortality and crisis-driven care. Instead, we’re calling for investment in voluntary, community-based supports like Housing First, peer support, therapy, and mental health first responder teams — evidence-based approaches that promote dignity and long-term recovery.

The recent New York Times article, Leading a Movement Away From Psychiatric Medication, highlights Laura Delano’s journey in stepping away from psychiatric treatment and advocating for greater autonomy in mental health care. While the article sheds light on important conversations about the harms of over-reliance and over-use of medication, it also includes a troubling and misleading claim: “for people with the most disabling mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, medication remains the only evidence-based treatment.”

This statement is egregiously false.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has released new guidance outlining a global framework for rights-based, person-centered, and recovery-oriented mental health systems, titled Guidance on mental health policy and strategic action plans. ISPS-US welcomes this much-needed publication, which closely aligns with our vision for humane, socially informed, and equitable approaches to psychosis and mental health care.

The national mental health and substance use recovery movement has long been rooted in the principles of disability rights, social justice, and recovery for all, working to ensure that people with mental health, substance use, and trauma-related challenges have access to the services, support, and dignity they want and deserve. Today, needed care and services are in serious jeopardy!

ISPS-US is excited to announce that our 2025 Annual Conference will take place November 7–9 in Chicago, Illinois. The pre-conference workshop will be held on November 7, followed by the full conference on November 8–9 at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Student Center West.

We're pleased to announce the release of our 2024 Annual Report, showcasing the incredible strides that ISPS-US has made in the last year.

Did you know that last year we:

Reached 80,233 people through our education through live attendance and viewings of our recordings?

Provided 23 webinars and workshops

Hosted 88 speakers at our Annual Conference

Increased our memberships over 2024 by 21%?

Learn more about our achievements by viewing the report.

ISPS-US and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis are pleased to co-sponsor a monthly clinical consultation group for early career clinicians working psychoanalytically/psychodynamically with individuals diagnosed with psychosis or experiencing extreme states. The group will meet monthly through January 2026.

Drunk on Too Much Life is an intimate and powerful documentary following the filmmaker's 21-year-old daughter’s mind-opening journey from locked-down psych wards and diagnostic labels towards expansive worlds of creativity, connection and greater meaning.

We're pleased to announce an exciting interactive workshop, with CEs available, to kick off our 2025 educational programming: Clinical Introduction to Narrative Enhancement and Cognitive Therapy: A Treatment Approach to Address The Negative Effects of Self-Stigma On People Diagnosed with Serious Mental Health Conditions with Philip T. Yanos, PhD.

ISPS-US is at an exciting time in our organizational history: We are having our first ever Board of Directors vote! Previously, the Board of Directors was composed only of the Regional Branch Chairs. We found this approach too limiting because people were forced to be on the board that didn't ask to be, and it did not allow for people who are not Branch Chairs to join. With our recent bylaws amendment, we are now able to have anyone with an active ISPS-US membership run for a position on the board. 

ISPS (the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis) wants to alert the world to the dangerous evolution of allowing euthanasia or assisted suicide for unbearable mental suffering caused by psychiatric conditions. This raises complex medical, ethical, and societal/political questions that cannot be considered in isolation.

In this presentation, Professor van den Berg will discuss the role of trauma in the development of psychosis, mechanisms in the association between trauma and psychosis, effects of trauma-focused therapies in psychosis, the transdiagnostic conceptualization of trauma, psychosis and PTSD spectrum problems, and the development of phase-based transdiagnostic interventions for traumatized individuals with psychosis that combine CBT with trauma-focused interventions.

Did you miss our 2024 Conference? No worries! You can now access recordings of all the incredible sessions from the event.

From transformative talks on reimagining psychosis care to in-depth discussions on trauma and social justice, dive into the content you might have missed. Gain insights, tools, and inspiration whenever it suits you.

We’re excited to share that the photos from our 2024 Conference New Beginnings: Reimagining Psychosis Services and Systems held in Pittsburgh, PA and hybrid online are now live.

In this webinar, Professor Stijn Vanheule will talk about his new book Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers (Other Press, 2024). Starting from the observation that, in contemporary mental health care, psychotic experiences are mainly seen as a sign of mental illness that needs to be managed, he advocates that such a viewpoint is limited because it neglects the psychological meaning these experiences entail. Drawing from his psychoanalytic background, Vanheule will present a model in which psychosis is linked to language use and the existential challenges we are all confronted with.

We warmly invite you to join us for the Conference Reception and Panel Discussion on Friday, November 1st, at 5:45 pm.

"Re-Visioning Mental Health and Practice" with Claire Bien, Sascha DuBrul, Becky Brasfield, Shannon Pagdon, Will Hall, and Christina Bomnae Babusci.

Description: Join us for an in-person panel discussion featuring emerging and established activist, clinical and policy leaders from across the US. Discussion will focus on priorities, actionable change, and equity in context of race, culture, gender identity, socioeconomic and disability. Refreshments provided.

We are pleased to announce a special 3-hour webinar, hosted by Sascha Altman DuBrul, MSW, dedicated to fundamental understanding and practice of Internal Family Systems in Psychosis, both in clinical and peer support related settings.

Sascha: Join me for a three-hour introductory class designed specifically for clinicians working with individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness (SMI) and psychosis. This workshop is for those curious about how to integrate strategies and wisdom from the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model into their work with this population.

Professor Joanna Moncrieff will present her reflections on the outcomes of the RADAR Trial, a major randomized controlled trial conducted in the UK that examined the effects of discontinuing versus maintaining long-term antipsychotic treatment. The trial found that while reduction led to a greater risk of relapse compared to continued maintenance treatment, there were no differences in social functioning, symptoms, side effects, or quality of life after two years. Yet relapse was far from inevitable and the qualitative analysis showed that some people felt empowered by the opportunity to reduce their medication with official support, regardless of the outcome. Dr. Moncrieff will discuss these nuanced findings and their broader implications for mental health care.

The federal Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) Act funds an army of lawyers through the Protection and Advocacy (P&A) system that are supposed to "ensure the rights of individuals with mental illness are protected." In order to do this, every P&A must have an Advisory Council to provide independent advice and recommendations, and with which it must jointly develop annual policies and priorities."Jointly" means the Council has veto power (as does the P&A). Or put another way, the annual policies and priorities must be negotiated between the P&A and the Council and not just imposed by the P&A, which is now prevalent.However, most P&As do not acknowledge the Councils' powerful role, stating the Councils are only "advisory," and ignoring that they must jointly determine the policies and priorities.  As a result, the P&A System has utterly failed to fulfill its statutory purpose to ensure the rights of people diagnosed with mental illness are protected.Largely because people’s rights to less restrictive and less intrusive alternatives are pervasively violated through forced drugging, the recovery rate for people diagnosed with serious mental illness is 5%, rather than the 80% we know is possible, and life spans are reduced by 20-25 years on average. This is laid out in the Report on Improving Mental Health Outcomes, which could be the guidebook for the PAIMI Councils in jointly developing their P&As' policies and priorities.

Join Oryx Cohen, CEO of the National Empowerment Center, and South African Josh, diagnosed bipolar 1 with an MA in Theology, to unpack the gifts of Neurodiversity in an engaging and dynamic webinar.

This collaborative series, brought to you as a collaboration between ISPS-US and the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA)’s Community of Practice (CoP) in Psychosis, explores psychosis as a profound human experience with significant implications for engagement in meaningful activities and relationships. By adopting an occupational lens, we offer a critical perspective on psychosis, challenging the traditional biomedical model that views it solely or primarily as a medical disorder, separated from the activities of life, society, and systems.

Did you know that your county has a Local Advisory Committee dedicated to mental health?  This committee is a public forum where stakeholders (mental health service consumers, providers, and family members) can voice feedback regarding the mental health services within their local community.  The feedback is then shared with county and state offices to inform policies that shape the mental health system within our local communities and our state. These meetings are open to the public and you need not be an official member of the committee to participate.

This webinar will introduce participants to Social Recovery Therapy (SRT; www.socialrecoverytherapy.co.uk), a CBT-informed intervention that aims to improve social and functional outcomes for people who have experienced psychosis. The ethos of SRT is to promote social recovery through increased time spent in structured activities that are meaningful to the individual. Social recovery is both personally valuable and important in its own right, as well as a facilitator of better mental health outcomes. SRT focuses on working with individuals and systems around them, e.g., family, friends, mental health/other professionals, and activity providers. This helps individuals to engage in meaningful activities within a system that supports and encourages them in doing so, which helps the engagement in activity to last.

The Greene Clinic is excited to be hosting Jeannie Bass and Claire Bien for a Hearing Voices Network Facilitator Training. Details are below, including registration information which can be found here.

14 CEs, for 14 hours of training, are available for New York State psychologists, social workers, licensed mental health counselors and psychoanalysts.

Friday, July 12th, 9am - 4pm — Saturday, July 13th, 9am - 4pm.

✦ This event will be in-person and not recorded. Location will be at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis at 78 Livingston St. Brooklyn, NY 11201.

Attendance for CE credit will be limited to 10 attendees who register for both July 12th & July 13th, for a total of $250. 

The deadline for proposal submissions to our upcoming conference has been extended to Monday, June 10th, 2024.

Our planning committee are working hard to make "New Beginnings: Reimagining Psychosis Services and Systems in the US" the most dynamic ISPS-US conference yet, and the proposals we have already received are exceptional.

We're pleased to invite you to our next live webinar event New Perspectives on Negative Symptoms: Incorporating Meaning-Centered Approaches and Lived Experience into Clinical Practice with Marie Brown, PhD, Nev Jones, PhD, and Shannon Pagdon, BA. This event promises to be an enlightening session, offering fresh insights and challenging traditional views on what are known as negative symptoms.

Join us virtually for a free, special summer discussion series about the book "Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt" by Sasha Warren. This time-limited series is being hosted by the Minnesota branch of ISPS-US on the occasion of this recent publication by a Minnesota author. The text explores global socio-cultural contexts in which psychiatric movements and counter-movements have played out and how those movements have led us to the ongoing questions regarding effective approaches to extreme states with which society still grapples. The event is free and everyone is welcome to participate, for either some or all of the sessions.⁠

We're thrilled to announce the first of our two keynote speakers for the upcoming ISPS-US 2024 Annual Conference "New Beginnings: Reimagining Psychosis Services and Systems in the US." Please join us in welcoming Professor Craig Steel, a distinguished clinical psychologist and researcher from the UK whose work has significantly advanced the development and evaluation of psychological treatments for psychosis. His research focuses on creating models to comprehend symptoms in the context of trauma, including integrating innovative approaches like the voice dialogue method for distressing voice hearing experiences. Full bio below.

This event brings together investigative journalist Rob Wipond, author of “Your Consent is Not Required,” Philip Yanos, PhD, professor, researcher, ACT team clinician, and author of “Written Off: Mental Health Stigma and the Loss of Human Potential,” along with Patrick Mureithi, a father, musician, and documentary filmmaker who will discuss his personal journey through self-medication, psychiatric abuse, and homelessness, and eventual recovery through spirituality, focus on physical health, and community support. 

Philip Yanos, PhD, ISPS-US Member, professor, and eminent researcher at CUNY has started a petition titled "Mayor Adams, stop scapegoating "severe mental illness""
⁠
We encourage you to sign on today!⁠
⁠
Description:⁠
Mayor Eric Adams has recently been scapegoating people with "severe mental illness" for high-profile public safety issues in New York City, including shootings committed by people without mental health histories 5%, or nearly 400,000, people in New York City are diagnosed with a "severe mental illness" and make major contributions to its communities. Let's let Mayor Adams know that it's not okay to use mental illness as a scapegoat for the city's problems.⁠

It's the news you've all been waiting for! We are thrilled to announce the much-awaited ISPS-US 2024 Annual Conference, to be held from November 1-3 in Pittsburgh, PA, and hybrid online.

Under the theme New Beginnings: Reimagining Psychosis Services and Systems in the US, this conference promises to be a dynamic platform for innovation, collaboration, and change.

Open Minded Online is a project of Elisabeth Svanholmer and Rufus May, two folks who were inspired to share methods of working with voices and similar experiences after they found their own experiences in traditional psychiatric treatment to be lacking. The approaches can be used by voice-hearers themselves, such as with the quick and practical Self-Help Guide to Talking With Voices, or with therapists, such as with the Engaging With Voices Videos.

ISPS-US Launches Speakers Bureau to Revolutionize Mental Health Conversations

PHILADELPHIA, PA - The International Society of Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis - US Chapter (ISPS-US) proudly introduces the ISPS-US Speakers Bureau. The Bureau offers access to a range of experts dedicated to changing the narrative on psychosis and mental health and championing psychological and social approaches that uphold human dignity.

Our Speakers Bureau brings together a diverse group of speakers, including service providers, academics, clinicians, individuals with lived experience of psychosis, and their families. By uniting these diverse voices, we aim to create an easily accessible and comprehensive resource for the press, organizations, and event planners.

Starting in April, ISPS-US will be hosting two new groups for our Members: Spiritual Wellness Conversation Group and Life Writing.

In the wake of several cities implementing policies to expand forced hospitalizations, this presentation will introduce several components of a psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of psychosis in community and urban environments.

Join ISPS-US member Sasha Warren for the launch of his new book Storming Bedlam. Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.

Dear ProPublica,

In response to your investigation into mental health care access, we are writing to you on behalf of ISPS-US, the US chapter of an international organization devoted to advocating for psychological and social approaches to psychosis.  While many of our members are mental health professionals and researchers, a significant proportion are people with lived experience or their family members who have embraced our organization after years and sometimes decades in the mental health system. 

Structural barriers to care pose a critical problem, but this problem is compounded by a crisis regarding the quality of the care that can be accessed. 

The human experience commonly labeled “schizophrenia” impacts all members of society in one way or another. Some experience it directly. Others witness loved ones or neighbors experiencing it. Most observe examples of it at one time or another in shared public spaces such as at bus stops and libraries. No matter the degree of contact we have with it, this state of being challenges us all as individuals and as a collective society. Is there a way we can approach this human condition with sincere compassion and respectful curiosity? Can we challenge ourselves to see first and foremost the human being having the experience and only then the behavioral expressions of the experience?

Join us for our March webinar "From Pathology to Purpose: Reiminaging The Past and Future of Mental Health" with Justin Garson, PhD, Philosophy Professor at CUNY, Historian, and author of Madness: A Philosophical Exploration. 

Date: Thursday, March 14th, 2024
Time: 12pm-1:30pm (Eastern)

Hot off the heels of our recent webinar together, we are pleased to announce that Danielle Knafo, PhD, will be presenting at the next meeting of the New York City Branch of ISPS-US (ISPS-US-NYC) on April 7th from 1-3pm Eastern.

The FREE event is in partnership with Adelphi University and will be held at the Adelphi Center at St Francis College, 179 Livingston Street, Room 5100, Brooklyn. Refreshments will be served and CEUs available.

My advice to seekers--keep an open mind! The stigma, the labels, the trauma, and the disease can be erased over the course of years of hard work! It took me a lot of perseverance and a steadfast belief in my own reason, healthy eating, connection with people, retraining my trauma with successes in work and in social life and also trusting the wisdom of others who have cured themselves and been able to get off medication.

I touched my book:
it was
compact,
solid,
arched
like a white ship,
half open
like a new rose,
it was
to my eyes
a mill,
from each page
of my book
sprouted the flower of bread;
I was blinded by my own rays,
I was insufferably
self-satisfied,
my feet left the ground
and I was walking
on clouds

Join ISPS-US for our Spring workshop series, Diverse Psychotherapeutic Approaches for Voice Hearing Series. 18 CE hours are available for APA and ASWB boards.

This series features six biweekly, expert-led workshops, each delving into a distinct therapeutic modality, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for psychosis (CBTp), Psychodynamic Therapy, Creative Arts Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS).

Our next webinar will be From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis, featuring renowned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Dr. Danielle Knafo.