EAST SIDE INSTITUTE | INITIATIVES

Creating Our Mental Health

“I came to wonder, maybe we could help each other in therapeutic ways. Maybe therapy didn’t have to be some fancy medicalized procedure; maybe it was a way in which human beings could learn to relate to each other — neighbors, friends, family — and thereby enhance our way of living. Maybe it wasn’t a quasi-medical technique at all — maybe it was a way to make a better life. Maybe we could learn to be more therapeutic with each other…to help each other grow and develop.”

— Therapeutics as a way of life, Fred Newman, 1998.

The Institute’s Creating Our Mental Health initiative involves people of all ages and all walks of life in creating new ways of relating to understandings of ‘mental health,’ ‘mental illness,’ psychiatric diagnoses, emotionality, development and learning.

Online Group Experience

Since 2020, Creating Our Mental Health free, social therapeutic, group-building conversations are offered monthly, online and led by Institute social and emotional development faculty, Hugh Polk, MD, Jessie Fields, MD, and Rachel Mickenberg, LCSW.

Participants learn the skills of creating conversation and building a group environment that supports the well-being, connection and growth of all. These free, drop-in group conversations are scheduled for the second Saturday of each month.

Register

Community Workshops

Faculty conduct “street-corner” community outreach–attending health fairs, farmer’s markets and other community events in Harlem to invite people to Creating Our Mental Health workshops, and organizing support from local churches, food banks and community centers to host the event for their communities.

In-person community workshops use play, performance, improv exercises and group poetry writing to foster environments in which private/hidden emotional pain, shame and humiliation can be shared with and transformed by the group.

For more information, please contact Associate Director, Melissa Meyer.

Conferences, Workshops, Presentations

At a time when incidences of despair and anxiety have skyrocketed in the US and internationally (especially in under-served communities), the Institute seeks to share the Creating Our Mental Health model with practitioners, coaches and group leaders, including with our growing roster of international Associates and overseas colleagues. ESI faculty regularly conduct professional workshops and presentations in-person and online to introduce the Creating Our Mental Health group-building, developmental approach.

For more information, Associate Director, Melissa Meyer.

Some History—

The Institute’s Creating Our Mental Health initiative grows out of a 35-year, non-diagnostic, cultural-relational approach to therapeutics as a way of life. Community building, we believe, is essential to emotional development –- as is the involvement of people of all ages and all walks of life in creating new ways of relating to understandings of ‘mental health,’ ‘mental illness,’ psychiatric diagnoses, emotionality, development and learning.

Beginning in the early-1980s, the ESI, through its community clinics in the Bronx, Harlem (and later in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn), New York, conducted routine health and mental health neighborhood outreach. “Healthy Clubs” sprung up in working class communities, offering group-based activities and workshops to support the health and emotional wellness of participants. Activities included meeting with local merchants to improve access to healthy food, blood pressure screenings, and group conversations on important topics such as “AIDS-afraid” and “The Joy of Dementia (Creating the Dementia Care Ensemble).” Ongoing social therapy groups in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn welcomed community leaders seeking to grow.

A decade later, in the wake of restrictive licensing requirements which censured alternative therapeutic approaches (2003) and the controversial revisions to the Fifth Edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), the Institute initiated a campaign to bring ordinary people into the national (mostly top-down) conversation on emotional distress and psychiatric diagnoses. Staff and volunteers attended street fairs in Harlem and Brooklyn, New York, went into churches and community centers, and administered a Survey on Emotional Distress and Mental Health Diagnoses. We talked to thousands of people — reaching an ethnically diverse crowd with substantial African American and working-class representation. All were invited to continue the conversation on if and how “the community needs therapy” and how to support the community’s emotional development.

Produced in partnership with the All Stars Project, Inc., and led by Institute faculty, the first Creating Our Mental Health workshops in 2015 originated as a popular offering at the All Stars Project’s free, university-style educational programming for working class and poor adults (called UX). Later in 2020, and with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshops continued as monthly, online Zoom group experiences.

Resources—

Blog Posts

Other Articles

Video

Workshops and Conference Presentations

Learn More