during my freshman year at Brown I was
offered a leave of absence after
disclosing to my professor that I was
transitioning antidepressants and
experiencing severe withdrawal somewhere
between my senior year of high school
and sophomore year of college I wound up
taking 375 milligrams of effexor an SS
NRI primarily to treat
obsessive-compulsive disorder and mood
disorders in addition to klonopin and
anti-anxiety drug and abilify an
anti-psychotic if I didn’t take what I
can only refer to as my horse pills at
the same time each day I would
experience brain zaps nausea migraines
and severe body aches when I was offered
a leave of absence instead of being
asked what support I needed or what the
school could do to help I went into
shutdown mode I thought they’re trying
to get rid of me they flagged me one
wrong move and I’m gone
and at Brown you’ve been given an
extreme privilege to attend an Ivy
League university happiness is almost
expected being social and grateful is
expected you can’t exactly go home and
tell your mom you haven’t read one
article on the syllabus haven’t yet been
to class in two weeks haven’t been able
to eat more than one yogurt a day and
your suicidal thoughts are at an
all-time high and especially as a
first-generation college student I can
still remember the weight of getting my
acceptance letter so the pressure was on
and if I was going to be able to stay at
Brown I needed to support myself outside
of systems of university care that night
I called my parents in a paranoid panic
psychotic state digging through the
internet researching university
surveillance policies when it came to
mental illness and vowing to never use
them again if I ever needed help well
later that semester I did need help I
experienced a severe self-harm episode
in my dorm room and I needed medical
attention I knew all of my options
health services caps after-hours line
Butler Hospital the emergency room but
what I didn’t know is what would happen
if I use those services with the
university find out what I’d be forced
into treatment or kept on suicide watch
I remembered my fear earlier in the
semester and decided to scotch tape part
of my leg
back together and hide in my room for
three days I developed this is a severe
infection with raised and purple scars
but at least I was still a brown student
now not everyone would react this way
with such initial mistrust but I had
already experienced four years of
educational bureaucracy in high school
and politics when it came to mental
illness as well as my own gaslighting by
the medical establishment and I knew how
far those in power were willing to go to
silence a potential threat in 2009 while
a freshman in high school
brittany marie petropia lost her life to
suicide we attended different schools
within the same district and our circle
of friends overlap significantly at 14
years old our world were shook we didn’t
have the language structure or support
systems to be able to support ourselves
or each other when students were denied
a memorial service denied the ability to
wear t-shirts with her face and name on
them and denied the opportunity to bring
in suicide prevention professionals I
wondered who we were really trying to
protect if at 14 I were old enough to
see the body of my friend at her week
then I was old enough to learn about
suicide and have a conversation and
these conversations were happening
anyway behind closed doors unmediated by
friends on the Internet and awkwardly
with family with good intentions or
worst of all alone by ourselves during
high school angered by the response to
my friend’s death I began advocate is
advocating for policy reform surrounding
how of seven to 12th grade educators
handled mental illness and suicide after
attending endless meetings at the
district I was told I could continue
doing my work but needed to keep my
personal politics out of it something I
was never willing or able to do if they
didn’t want to support us we would have
to support ourselves when I founded
Project Lots in 2013 we focused
primarily on erasing the stigma as our
name very much indicates but as I later
realized that we’d like to imagine a
world without stigma it’s still very
real for many folks especially the most
marginalized of us we can tell people
all we’d like to seek help what does
that do to address the traumas they may
face once they seek that how
or what if an individual can’t afford
their copay what if we encourage someone
to come out as mentally ill and they
lose their job or their place in their
family most Mental Health Organization’s
focus on raising awareness and at first
that’s what we did to you
we believe like many still do today
that’s stigma and access to care with
the primary problems my education at
Brown and continued life experiences
have taught me otherwise this data from
a report on the nature of suicidal
crises and college students shows that a
mental health professional was least
influential in preventing a suicide
attempt far below friends family and
other social factors like pets
so this told us that we needed a space
unmediated by professionals were folks
with mental illness trauma experience
and disability could find support for
themselves and support for others and
beyond that we also realized that we
were the best people equipped to
advocate for policy reform nobody knew
the intricacies of the system than we
did better than we did and nobody else
could provide first-hand narratives to
counteract what we were being told by
administrators I was like colleague
Molly likes to say universities see
mentally ill and disabled students as
the baby or the grenade as the baby
you’re asking for too much and being too
needy too many accommodations
exaggerating symptoms who can be this
sick all of the time right and if you’re
the grenade you’re a liability a risk
and a ticking time bomb and the grenade
metaphor is what most administrators
view us as when they are designing
policies over time students came to us
for help
and we started uncovering alarming
consistencies across schools across the
nation suggesting a much more intensive
surveillance and risk management culture
than we had anticipated which can be in
part attributed to responses in higher
education following the Virginia Tech
crisis we became aware of patterns of
who is being disproportionately impacted
by these policies such as lower income
international trans and queer students
of color in addition we also identified
pervasive flaws with the mental
healthcare infrastructure in general
most prominently a short term
therapeutic model that reverse
refers high rates of students off campus
a lack of availability and a lack of
diverse representation of providers and
outside of seeking help a primary issue
for me became not seeing myself
represented in the brown student body
and in my peers around me I knew what to
Google for an overly simplistic
monk-like explanation of what OCD was
and how it’s all about germs but I
didn’t know how other brown students
managed to share their freshman year
dorm bathrooms allow their friends to
sit on their bed or make it through a
200-page novel without needing to read
every fourth page four times through
which takes hours I needed to see for
myself how other Brown students were
surviving with their lived experience
but something else we realized was that
nobody truly believed students with
severe mental illness can exist at Brown
we’re becoming more comfortable talking
about depression and anxiety but there
couldn’t be any bipolar or schizophrenic
students here right in my anthropology
of mental health class we read Emily
Martin’s bipolar expeditions
Martin lived with bipolar disorder and
while teaching at Princeton approached
the head of psychiatric services wanting
to start a support group for bipolar
students the psychiatrists responded
that it would not be necessary
considering students with those kinds of
severe problems would simply not be able
to function in the intellectually
demanding environment at Princeton this
was in the 80s but what does it mean for
students to function beyond performing
academically is it simply just
medication and a good therapist for
years the disability community has also
been championing a model framework
called the social model of disability it
wasn’t truly until I experienced my
third sexual assault at Brown that I
understood the implications and power of
this model with a social model of
disability we could actually make a
difference in my own experience in my
conversations with students and peers
most felt more impacted by stigma
discrimination and social barriers like
a lack of accommodations and acceptance
than by their own symptoms and following
this logic working to remove those
barriers could potentially increase our
quality of life since most of us are
entrenched in
medical model of disability which tells
us that the problem is located inside of
our bodies we often ignore very
important information and contesting
narratives such as for example sexual
assault survivors who don’t feel like a
PTSD diagnosis accurately represents
them is there really something wrong
with me when something wrong has
happened to me
additionally we know that trans folks
with supportive families are far less
likely to attempt suicide so how can we
say there’s something wrong with them
this framework allowed us to create peer
led interventions that we believe work
perhaps we can’t take away your
psychosis but we can advocate on your
behalf to ensure you’re receiving the
resources and support you’re legally
entitled to and maybe for our most
vulnerable students we could help tip
the balance in their favor which is
exactly what we’ve been achieving for
the peer mental health advocate model at
Brown p.m. AJ is put simply our students
with lived experience of mental illness
trauma and disability trained to work as
peer counsellors and advocates for their
fellow students at Brown we currently
have over 85 students consistently using
the program and approximately 80 trained
p.m. EJ is our six-week curriculum
covers everything from relationship
building and listening skills to coping
mechanisms crisis response and
trauma-informed care now when you’re
trying to innovate in the healthcare
field or anything marginally related to
science you need evidence
I don’t just expect you to believe me
because I’m mentally ill PHAs have their
own defined role we’re not therapists
we’re advocates supporters change agents
and more we draw on our life experiences
in an intentional way to inform our
actions in each of these roles primarily
we want the folks we work with to find
ways to heal and move forward on their
own terms
research from Mental Health America also
shows that peer support benefits
providers as well as patients decreased
hospitalizations and shortened stays in
inpatient care translates into financial
savings which doctors really like to
hear
and in addition embedding peers within
the system allows providers to
appreciate alternative views of
folks with mental illness functioning in
social ROS roles as opposed to always
just being the ill patient there are
specifics like the social processes that
have been identified in terms of peer
support and helped us to understand how
it’s working in terms of social support
we provide peers with an available
person they can rely on who’s willing to
assist and meet their needs while
combating isolation experiential
knowledge refers to a specialized
information and perspective that folks
can only gain by having that lived
experience social comparison theory at
its core means representation we need to
see ourselves like others to know that
we can survive and most importantly for
us is help our therapy principle but
simply helping others helps us and we
have witnessed this time and time again
those who may be consistently poor
supports for themselves are the most
skilled advocates we have a few weeks
ago I had a severe self-harm episode in
my apartment much like freshman year
except this time I wasn’t alone this
time even as someone chronically
resistant to treatment and allergic to
asking for help I reached out to one of
my own peer mental health advocates and
was supported like I never have been by
one of my professional therapists I was
treated with dignity autonomy kindness
and compassion I was asked what I wanted
and was assumed to be able to make my
own decisions these are the lessons that
peers with lived experience can teach
the professionals I want to challenge us
to think of what a world would look like
or we don’t call nine-one-one on
suicidal people or lock them up for
disobeying commands they may be unable
to follow in the first place what would
a world look like where we took
accountability for our loved ones and
our community members and trained
ourselves in crisis intervention and
de-escalation skills where we were able
to create inclusive spaces and
institution institutions that allowed
all types of folks and all types of
neurodivergent minds to thrive where we
were able to look at our mentally ill
and disabled friends who reach out in a
time of support and say
thank you for telling me what does this
mean for you right now how can I help
you feel safe where we recognize that
even though I do not have a pH pH D I am
the expert of my own mind and body a
world who revalue the knowledge produced
by folks with lived-experience Center
our voices and integrate our solutions
and systems of support into the larger
mental health care system so no college
student ever responds to a self-harm
episode alone in their dorm room again
and so we can get to college in the
first place thank you
[Applause]
offered a leave of absence after
disclosing to my professor that I was
transitioning antidepressants and
experiencing severe withdrawal somewhere
between my senior year of high school
and sophomore year of college I wound up
taking 375 milligrams of effexor an SS
NRI primarily to treat
obsessive-compulsive disorder and mood
disorders in addition to klonopin and
anti-anxiety drug and abilify an
anti-psychotic if I didn’t take what I
can only refer to as my horse pills at
the same time each day I would
experience brain zaps nausea migraines
and severe body aches when I was offered
a leave of absence instead of being
asked what support I needed or what the
school could do to help I went into
shutdown mode I thought they’re trying
to get rid of me they flagged me one
wrong move and I’m gone
and at Brown you’ve been given an
extreme privilege to attend an Ivy
League university happiness is almost
expected being social and grateful is
expected you can’t exactly go home and
tell your mom you haven’t read one
article on the syllabus haven’t yet been
to class in two weeks haven’t been able
to eat more than one yogurt a day and
your suicidal thoughts are at an
all-time high and especially as a
first-generation college student I can
still remember the weight of getting my
acceptance letter so the pressure was on
and if I was going to be able to stay at
Brown I needed to support myself outside
of systems of university care that night
I called my parents in a paranoid panic
psychotic state digging through the
internet researching university
surveillance policies when it came to
mental illness and vowing to never use
them again if I ever needed help well
later that semester I did need help I
experienced a severe self-harm episode
in my dorm room and I needed medical
attention I knew all of my options
health services caps after-hours line
Butler Hospital the emergency room but
what I didn’t know is what would happen
if I use those services with the
university find out what I’d be forced
into treatment or kept on suicide watch
I remembered my fear earlier in the
semester and decided to scotch tape part
of my leg
back together and hide in my room for
three days I developed this is a severe
infection with raised and purple scars
but at least I was still a brown student
now not everyone would react this way
with such initial mistrust but I had
already experienced four years of
educational bureaucracy in high school
and politics when it came to mental
illness as well as my own gaslighting by
the medical establishment and I knew how
far those in power were willing to go to
silence a potential threat in 2009 while
a freshman in high school
brittany marie petropia lost her life to
suicide we attended different schools
within the same district and our circle
of friends overlap significantly at 14
years old our world were shook we didn’t
have the language structure or support
systems to be able to support ourselves
or each other when students were denied
a memorial service denied the ability to
wear t-shirts with her face and name on
them and denied the opportunity to bring
in suicide prevention professionals I
wondered who we were really trying to
protect if at 14 I were old enough to
see the body of my friend at her week
then I was old enough to learn about
suicide and have a conversation and
these conversations were happening
anyway behind closed doors unmediated by
friends on the Internet and awkwardly
with family with good intentions or
worst of all alone by ourselves during
high school angered by the response to
my friend’s death I began advocate is
advocating for policy reform surrounding
how of seven to 12th grade educators
handled mental illness and suicide after
attending endless meetings at the
district I was told I could continue
doing my work but needed to keep my
personal politics out of it something I
was never willing or able to do if they
didn’t want to support us we would have
to support ourselves when I founded
Project Lots in 2013 we focused
primarily on erasing the stigma as our
name very much indicates but as I later
realized that we’d like to imagine a
world without stigma it’s still very
real for many folks especially the most
marginalized of us we can tell people
all we’d like to seek help what does
that do to address the traumas they may
face once they seek that how
or what if an individual can’t afford
their copay what if we encourage someone
to come out as mentally ill and they
lose their job or their place in their
family most Mental Health Organization’s
focus on raising awareness and at first
that’s what we did to you
we believe like many still do today
that’s stigma and access to care with
the primary problems my education at
Brown and continued life experiences
have taught me otherwise this data from
a report on the nature of suicidal
crises and college students shows that a
mental health professional was least
influential in preventing a suicide
attempt far below friends family and
other social factors like pets
so this told us that we needed a space
unmediated by professionals were folks
with mental illness trauma experience
and disability could find support for
themselves and support for others and
beyond that we also realized that we
were the best people equipped to
advocate for policy reform nobody knew
the intricacies of the system than we
did better than we did and nobody else
could provide first-hand narratives to
counteract what we were being told by
administrators I was like colleague
Molly likes to say universities see
mentally ill and disabled students as
the baby or the grenade as the baby
you’re asking for too much and being too
needy too many accommodations
exaggerating symptoms who can be this
sick all of the time right and if you’re
the grenade you’re a liability a risk
and a ticking time bomb and the grenade
metaphor is what most administrators
view us as when they are designing
policies over time students came to us
for help
and we started uncovering alarming
consistencies across schools across the
nation suggesting a much more intensive
surveillance and risk management culture
than we had anticipated which can be in
part attributed to responses in higher
education following the Virginia Tech
crisis we became aware of patterns of
who is being disproportionately impacted
by these policies such as lower income
international trans and queer students
of color in addition we also identified
pervasive flaws with the mental
healthcare infrastructure in general
most prominently a short term
therapeutic model that reverse
refers high rates of students off campus
a lack of availability and a lack of
diverse representation of providers and
outside of seeking help a primary issue
for me became not seeing myself
represented in the brown student body
and in my peers around me I knew what to
Google for an overly simplistic
monk-like explanation of what OCD was
and how it’s all about germs but I
didn’t know how other brown students
managed to share their freshman year
dorm bathrooms allow their friends to
sit on their bed or make it through a
200-page novel without needing to read
every fourth page four times through
which takes hours I needed to see for
myself how other Brown students were
surviving with their lived experience
but something else we realized was that
nobody truly believed students with
severe mental illness can exist at Brown
we’re becoming more comfortable talking
about depression and anxiety but there
couldn’t be any bipolar or schizophrenic
students here right in my anthropology
of mental health class we read Emily
Martin’s bipolar expeditions
Martin lived with bipolar disorder and
while teaching at Princeton approached
the head of psychiatric services wanting
to start a support group for bipolar
students the psychiatrists responded
that it would not be necessary
considering students with those kinds of
severe problems would simply not be able
to function in the intellectually
demanding environment at Princeton this
was in the 80s but what does it mean for
students to function beyond performing
academically is it simply just
medication and a good therapist for
years the disability community has also
been championing a model framework
called the social model of disability it
wasn’t truly until I experienced my
third sexual assault at Brown that I
understood the implications and power of
this model with a social model of
disability we could actually make a
difference in my own experience in my
conversations with students and peers
most felt more impacted by stigma
discrimination and social barriers like
a lack of accommodations and acceptance
than by their own symptoms and following
this logic working to remove those
barriers could potentially increase our
quality of life since most of us are
entrenched in
medical model of disability which tells
us that the problem is located inside of
our bodies we often ignore very
important information and contesting
narratives such as for example sexual
assault survivors who don’t feel like a
PTSD diagnosis accurately represents
them is there really something wrong
with me when something wrong has
happened to me
additionally we know that trans folks
with supportive families are far less
likely to attempt suicide so how can we
say there’s something wrong with them
this framework allowed us to create peer
led interventions that we believe work
perhaps we can’t take away your
psychosis but we can advocate on your
behalf to ensure you’re receiving the
resources and support you’re legally
entitled to and maybe for our most
vulnerable students we could help tip
the balance in their favor which is
exactly what we’ve been achieving for
the peer mental health advocate model at
Brown p.m. AJ is put simply our students
with lived experience of mental illness
trauma and disability trained to work as
peer counsellors and advocates for their
fellow students at Brown we currently
have over 85 students consistently using
the program and approximately 80 trained
p.m. EJ is our six-week curriculum
covers everything from relationship
building and listening skills to coping
mechanisms crisis response and
trauma-informed care now when you’re
trying to innovate in the healthcare
field or anything marginally related to
science you need evidence
I don’t just expect you to believe me
because I’m mentally ill PHAs have their
own defined role we’re not therapists
we’re advocates supporters change agents
and more we draw on our life experiences
in an intentional way to inform our
actions in each of these roles primarily
we want the folks we work with to find
ways to heal and move forward on their
own terms
research from Mental Health America also
shows that peer support benefits
providers as well as patients decreased
hospitalizations and shortened stays in
inpatient care translates into financial
savings which doctors really like to
hear
and in addition embedding peers within
the system allows providers to
appreciate alternative views of
folks with mental illness functioning in
social ROS roles as opposed to always
just being the ill patient there are
specifics like the social processes that
have been identified in terms of peer
support and helped us to understand how
it’s working in terms of social support
we provide peers with an available
person they can rely on who’s willing to
assist and meet their needs while
combating isolation experiential
knowledge refers to a specialized
information and perspective that folks
can only gain by having that lived
experience social comparison theory at
its core means representation we need to
see ourselves like others to know that
we can survive and most importantly for
us is help our therapy principle but
simply helping others helps us and we
have witnessed this time and time again
those who may be consistently poor
supports for themselves are the most
skilled advocates we have a few weeks
ago I had a severe self-harm episode in
my apartment much like freshman year
except this time I wasn’t alone this
time even as someone chronically
resistant to treatment and allergic to
asking for help I reached out to one of
my own peer mental health advocates and
was supported like I never have been by
one of my professional therapists I was
treated with dignity autonomy kindness
and compassion I was asked what I wanted
and was assumed to be able to make my
own decisions these are the lessons that
peers with lived experience can teach
the professionals I want to challenge us
to think of what a world would look like
or we don’t call nine-one-one on
suicidal people or lock them up for
disobeying commands they may be unable
to follow in the first place what would
a world look like where we took
accountability for our loved ones and
our community members and trained
ourselves in crisis intervention and
de-escalation skills where we were able
to create inclusive spaces and
institution institutions that allowed
all types of folks and all types of
neurodivergent minds to thrive where we
were able to look at our mentally ill
and disabled friends who reach out in a
time of support and say
thank you for telling me what does this
mean for you right now how can I help
you feel safe where we recognize that
even though I do not have a pH pH D I am
the expert of my own mind and body a
world who revalue the knowledge produced
by folks with lived-experience Center
our voices and integrate our solutions
and systems of support into the larger
mental health care system so no college
student ever responds to a self-harm
episode alone in their dorm room again
and so we can get to college in the
first place thank you
[Applause]
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