Thank you for joining us today. My name is Gabriel Contreras, and I am with the American Psychiatric Association, Division of Diversity and Health Equity. I am pleased to introduce today's topic for our APA Striving for Excellence series, and the topic today is Injustice Rolling Down Like Boulders, the Traumatic Impact of Supreme Court Rulings on the Mental Health of Marginalized Populations. Our guest speaker today is Micah Pearson, and he's the second vice president of the NAMI National Board of Directors. Next slide. This project is funded through the Striving for Excellence series, was made possible by a grant from SAMHSA of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The contents of those of the authors do not necessarily represent the official views nor an endorsement by SAMHSA, HHS, or the U.S. government. For attending today, you could actually receive continuing education credit. The APA is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. More information will be given towards the end on how to claim your credit. There are handouts that are made available to you, so how to download handouts. If you're joining us through the desktop, use the handouts area of the attendee control panel, or if you're on the instant join viewer, please click the page symbol to display the handouts area. And I do recommend you download both of them because there's a lot of information, good information that will be discussed today. In addition, how to participate in Q&A. You're going to receive a wealth of information today, but the best part is also the conversation that we can have with you and the audience. So on the desktop, use the questions area of the attendee control panel, as it's shown here, and on the instant join webinar, click the question mark symbol to display the questions area. The speaker has no disclosures, no relevant financial disclosures to share. And now please welcome our speaker, Micah. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and to the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any citizen of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any persons within its jurisdiction the equal protections of the laws. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Good morning. I will be speaking to you about a lot of things today, but I'm going to prepare you for what's coming. I was originally tasked to come and talk about something else entirely, and given the events of the last few weeks, I asked if I could change the topic and focus on something that I was incredibly passionate about, which is the intersection of public policy and mental health. We're going to go a little bit further about that, but I wanted to prepare you that a lot of this presentation is going to talk about legal history before we get to the actual mental health aspects, and it's because I want to provide context. So we're going to get a lot of legal history, we're even going to get some population demographics, and then we're going to go. But I promise it's going to be more interesting than it sounds. So without further ado, let's go back to the slides. So the context, the mountain, as I called it, nearly a century later. For those of you who are familiar with it, Loving v. Virginia was the primary case that changed the face of interracial marriage. Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her white husband, Richard Loving, were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other in 1958, and their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Identity Act of 1924, which criminalized, it was part of their anti-miscegenation laws. So the Supreme Court did agree to hear the case, and in June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Loving's favor, overturning their convictions, thereby legalizing interracial marriage. And it made it the law of the land that interracial marriage was allowed. Specifically, the court cited that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment that I read out at the start of this presentation. So when I say that I was inspired by the recent events, why am I starting with this? And that's because less than a decade after this ruling, Nancy Hayden Lynn Glaspie, a white woman from Pennsylvania, married Haney Richard Pearson Jr., a person of color, on February 2nd, 1974, in his hometown of Vienna, Virginia. On October 28th, 1976, in a George Washington Memorial Hospital, they had a son, me. So I'm Micah Pearson, I am the first legally biracial member of my family, and I've officially been allowed to say that since the year 2000. I have been a NAMI National Board member since 2017, and as I said earlier, my particular field of expertise here that's germane to today's discussion is that I'm considered knowledgeable in the intersection of mental health and public policy. To that end, I chaired the NAMI Peer Leadership Council's National Advocacy Committee, as well as the Board of Directors Public Policy Committee for the last seven years total. And I currently serve as our New Mexico Governor's, as an advisor to the Behavioral Health Council, and the Planning Council here. Not specifically germane to today, but also an important context that I remembered as I was putting this together, is that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1998. Which means I have been legally able to say I had bipolar disorder longer than I was able to identify as a person of biracial heritage. And I would like y'all to imagine which one of those two classifications is recognized in more states. So why are we here? I noticed that when we talk about the criminal justice system or the justice system's impact on mental health, we tend to think very narrowly. We tend to think at the interactions with police and at local criminal courts. We don't tend to think as the justice system as a full-blown system that goes all the way up to the federal level. Systems of power disproportionately affect marginalized communities. And we'll talk about that later when I get to my Superfund census data. But it is important to note that one of the reasons why we need to think about the justice system as a larger system that crosses jurisdictions and even touches on federal policy, is that because the knockdown effects of those systems overwhelmingly impact marginalized communities. And when I talk about marginalized communities, I am talking about race, equity, and of course LGBTQ plus populations. But I'm also specifically thinking about poverty line populations. People below the poverty line, the impoverished. So these are people that we serve as providers, but they are also us. We are all in some way, shape, or form going to find ourselves impacted by this policy and by these policies. And of course, the last few weeks probably haven't been super great for a lot of people. And I'm including my audience here that I can't see, but those of you that I'm talking to through this camera, I'm including you in that as well. So this is where I said we're going to get to some history here. I also want to point out that a lot of these slides have a lot of text. I'm not expecting you to read them all, and I'm certainly not going to read them all. That's why there's a PDF handout that you can download. Most importantly, I want you to walk away with the, actually weirdly enough, the emotional impact of seeing that amount of information about some of this stuff will leave you. Things like the fact that Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka was not actually a single case. It was actually five cases that were lumped together. And it would take almost more than a decade actually for Brown versus the Board of Education to finally have a complete impact on our education system and separate it yet equal, but equal as a whole. There were several cases that continued to argue against certain aspects of Brown versus Board of Education for over a decade. And then of course, there was the Civil Rights Act was implemented in 1964, but then it required to a Supreme Court ruling to say that, yes, it was constitution. Keep in mind, a law saying people deserve civil rights had to be fought for in court to be determined constitutional. Then of course, Roe v. Wade, those of you who are here have probably guessed why that's on this list, Obergefell, which of course said that Loving v. Virginia applied to same sex married couples as well. Between 1874 and 2015, there have been 32 cases about the 14th Amendment specifically. The 14th Amendment gets cited in a lot of different cases, but there were 32 cases specifically about the equal protections clauses of the 14th Amendment. And then of course, the 14th Amendment is part of the overall number of legal statutes and amendments that apply to our implied right to privacy. We don't actually explicitly have a right to privacy in the United States. That's a thing that people don't seem to understand. So that's 148 years of defending to have rights, equal rights, 148 years to get rights that we were only granted 90 years after the country was founded. We have to fight to convince this country that we deserve to have equal rights. I put that out in there so that you would understand when I say the context, we're talking about a hundred, I'm going to make myself big for this, 148 years of defending our rights to have any rights. Think about how exhausting that is to have to have to constantly fight just to have the same rights as anybody else. So this, I am going to read out in total because this was taken straight from the Supreme Court's website about the court. Here's who they think they are. Equal justice under the law. These words written above the main entrance of the Supreme Court building express the ultimate responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States. The court is the highest tribunal in the nation for all cases and controversies arising under the constitution or the laws of the United States. As the final arbiter of the law, the court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under the law and thereby also functions as a guardian and interpreter of the constitution. Emphasis here is mine. They are the final arbiters of the law. They proclaim that they protect equal justice under the law. And this is where I remind you that out of 121 justices in the 233 year history of the court, exactly four of them have not been white. And only three of them have ever served together at one time as Clarence Thomas was a direct replacement for Thurgood Marshall, which I do believe I have here. Yes, I do. So as the final arbiters of the law, I would like to remind you that they have finally made statements, made final statements about the law where say separate but equal was constitutional in Plessy versus Ferguson, which of course was later overturned. But what I really wanted to point out was the Insular Cases, which were a series of rulings between 1901 and 1905. And some people, some scholars will argue that those cases continued into 1914. But it specifically applied to the unincorporated territories of the new, the new territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. But the gist of these rulings were basically that the constitution follows the flag. If you don't have a star on the flag, the constitution does not apply to you. And the thing that's really disturbing is that these cases have never really been overturned or reexamined, or even the courts themselves have said, we no longer abide by these rulings because they were founded in white supremacy and racism. And lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's some quotes from some of those. As the final arbiters of the law, if those possessions are inhabited by alien races differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and mode of thought, the administration of the government in justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible. That was in the decision that upheld the right to not have the constitution apply to certain states, I'm sorry, certain unincorporated territories. One of them is a state now because this originally included Hawaii. From our construction of the powers of the government and of the treaty with Spain, the danger of the nationalization of the savage tribes cannot arise. Again, I would like people listening to this to understand this is still on the books. This was cited as recently, just openly in 2016, where it was stated that the same-sex marriage rulings that were now the federal law of the land, thanks to Obergefell, did not have to apply to Puerto Rico, that they could pass laws in Puerto Rico denying those marriages. So this takes us to the inspiration for today's presentation, Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, where they overruled Roe v. Wade. I'm not going to get into politics here. I know it sounds weird. I just brought up a whole bunch of stuff about court rulings and things like that. I'm not going to get into politics. I really don't care to have that conversation, and I'm sure you didn't come here to have it either. So I just am going to point out that Roe v. Wade was overturned and that it has a very specific mental health impact. So regardless of personal feelings about abortion or choice, that's entirely up to the individual listening. I'm just here to talk about what the impacts these rulings will have on people. But a thing that was kind of covered up or people weren't paying attention to in the Roe v. Wade overturning, because that just kind of shook the entire country, was Vega v. Techo. The important thing about Vega v. Techo, if you haven't heard about it, and a lot of people haven't, is that the court upheld that an individual who has denied Miranda warnings and whose compelled statements are introduced against them in a court trial cannot sue the officer who violated their rights, even where a criminal jury finds them not guilty of any crime. This is actually the second or third rollback of Miranda protections that we've seen in the last 10 years, at least. There's probably been more that I'm not thinking of right now. First of all, you have to actually state that you're asserting your Miranda rights now. They're not implied or they're not implicit. You have to be told your rights, but you actually have to state that you were asserting your right to silence. Now, there's less accountability on if somebody violates your Miranda rights. It is important to note that in the United States, the police are allowed to lie to suspects about the evidence that they have, that has been held up in rulings time and time again. They are allowed to misrepresent the facts of their case that they're putting together to the suspect when they're trying to get a confession. The fact of the matter is they now are not held civilly accountable to violating protections that you do have, makes it less likely that they're going to be used. Now, I threw that in here because I don't actually have the data here in the slide specifics because I focused on a specific area and I didn't want to overwhelm you with too much legal and demographic data. But we know, generally speaking, who is more likely to interact with law enforcement. And it's going to be the poor. It's also going to be minority populations. So I wanted to make sure that people here were also aware of Vega v. Techo. So I left this off at the beginning, and I should have mentioned a couple of things. I want to make sure that I get through the slides so that we can get to the questions and answers and other things. But two things that I didn't mention was, as a child who was developing bipolar disorder, I developed an interesting habit right around 10 or 11 that my parents used to brag to their friends about. One is that I used to read Supreme Court decisions and their dissents in total. Now this was back when I was younger and and thought again that the United States could do no wrong, the Supreme Court was here to protect us and was and had an unblemished history of making things right. I was 10 years old, okay, you know, I had a simplified view of the world and it's actually in a pre-internet era was not easy to get full texts of decisions that the Supreme Court wasn't necessarily proud of. So I didn't learn most of this stuff until much later in life and I certainly didn't learn it in school. The other aspect of me is that I was, I'm the descendant of two economists and one who retired from as an economist and became an information systems specialist. We love data in my family, we have a passionate love affair with data. It's so much so that one of the ways that I relax is putting together spreadsheets to organize things like my movie collections, comic book collections, and other things. I just like data and I like charts. So it's a personality quirk that I have but it came in handy when I wanted to see things like the impact of these decisions and so what we're going to be looking at in the next slide that I already was showing you a little bit is the 2020 census demographic data that shows where in the country there are 25% or more African Americans in the population, in the total population. So I currently live in New Mexico and we, the African American population here is about 1.4% of the entire state. As a matter of fact, for the longest time I was considered the only light-skinned black person in the entirety of my county and I finally saw another one. We got to talking and we turned out he was a student that was only here for the semester so I might be back to being the only one. But I actually originally came from the DC metro area which is, I was 13 before I understood why black people were called a minority because I grew up in DC and the only time I ever left it was to go visit my family in Vienna. So I was really interested to see this next chart that's coming up. Button, there we go. So here you can see in the darker green areas those are the populations where you have 25% or more African Americans in the overall population of the state. The tan, the lighter yellow areas, that's canary yellow on my screen so we'll call it that, are the areas where it is less than 5%. As you can see New Mexico is in there and if you look you can see Maryland is one of the 25% or more so you can understand my confusion. So what I'm going to do is immediately overlay this with the states that are going to have rollbacks, immediate rollbacks, of abortion protections. Again the previous slide, the previous, I can't go back, great. We're trying a new setup today and I'm noticing some technical challenges with it. So, but you can see that in the South at least all the states that are having immediate rollbacks are also states that have 25% or more African Americans. As a matter of fact there's literally only one state in the Union that has a population of 25% or more African Americans and is not immediately losing reproductive rights and that's Maryland. Now you'll see also, I know I can hear some of you out there going, but Micah there's other states in there that were also in the 5% or less population or at least I hope you're saying that, that's me hoping that you're still engaged. So the reason for that is because I had, that's important, is because some 75% of abortion patients in 2014 were poor. They live below the poverty line. So while this will absolutely have a negative impact on the minority populations, specifically African American populations because of where we tend to be located in the state and the country, it's important to see what the same population data for income. Because again darker colors mean more of. So we're looking at the darker purples are where more people live below the poverty line than not. It's where it's between, and that's seriously the darkest color of measurement is 14 to 18% for those of you can't see it here, I can actually do this thing, 14 to 18%. Now look at that same map again. You'll see that this will overwhelmingly, these protections being taken away, will overwhelmingly affect people below the poverty line. So I mentioned again I was throwing a lot of data at you and that I want you to be able at your leisure to go back and look at them over, look those those slides over and see for yourselves. And in the PDF that is attached in your handout section I had to separate those slides out with the with the overlays but you can still flip back and forth and see how things are going. So we've talked about the historical context of the constant struggle for equality and rights. We've talked about the fact that certain rights and protections were rolled back recently and that those decisions will overwhelmingly affect African-American populations and and people below the poverty line. Those are the those are the things that are in there, right? So let's actually remind people that yes this is actually a presentation about mental health. We've made it through the legalese and the census data y'all. Now let's talk about the mental health aspect. So I would like actually, I know we have a question and answer section, I would actually like to see if possible if there are, if people can actually type in as questions answers. If not, think about this amongst yourselves. Are there associations between having or being denied an abortion with women's mental health and well-being? Now I'm looking, I'm gonna focus on the Roe v. Wade one here, okay? I'm not, this could have been a three-hour presentation where we talked about the knockdown effects of all of these decisions. I'm focusing right now on Roe v. Wade because interestingly enough the APA, both APAs and Psychological Association and Psychiatric Association had a lot to say about this and you should be aware of that. So are there associations between having or being denied an abortion with women's mental health and well-being? That was a question that I'm asking to you and a question that has been asked. Since I'm not seeing questions popping in, I will say we'll move on to the next one. There was, there is a study, a longitudinal cohort study that observed 956 women semi-annually for five years. Eight days after seeking an abortion, women who were denied an abortion reported significantly more anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction. This is a cited study that I, the emphasis here is mine, so I want you to be aware of that. And the study is in the footnote. I should remind you, I'm not an academic, so I've done way more academic research on this presentation than I've done in like 90% of the other ones I do because usually end up talking about my own personal experiences more often. Outcomes improved or remain steady over time. So, but the recovery from the the anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction was about the same as people who had access to reproductive rights, but the important aspect to note is that there were significantly more anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem when they were denied those rights. There we go. And this was for, you know, from women's mental health and well-being five years after receiving or being denied an abortion, a perspective from the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2017. Abortion denial may be initially associated with psychological harm to women and findings do not support restricting abortion on the basis that abortion harms women's mental health. So let's think about why, for a second, why that is. Why did people have higher instances of anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem when they were denied rights, equal rights and protections? There's a great work out there called the disempowerment trap map, which actually talks about the statistical likelihood and increased statistical likelihood of Asian American women to take their own lives. And as in speaking about that, that work, the author chose the title of a work citing the association between depression and power. When people are depressed, they are thinking about suicide. They have arrived at a point where they feel powerless. Because they feel powerless, they are hopeless. I started this off by saying, think about how exhausting it is to constantly have to fight for equal rights. Think about, and let me tell you, when I put together a presentation, I'm a machine. I will sit down and I will knock my slides out in an hour or two with all the citations and references as needed. And as a matter of fact, before this, before we started during our little tech rehearsal in the beginning, we talked a lot about how somebody who will remain nameless has a presentation that's due next week and that they'll probably, they might work on it on the plane on the way there. Doing this presentation, I could only do a couple of hours each day and at the end of each day I'd have maybe two or three slides done. It took me two full weeks to put together the slides for this because it was exhausting to read. It was exhausting to be reminded that there are not equal protections and that while there are people going around constantly patting themselves on the back saying we have them, it was exhausting to just be shown line after line that just proved that to be patently false. And to see how not, how, we've come a really long way and we've taken some really big steps back and that was exhausting to put together as a slideshow presentation for you. So I could only do this in little chunks and as a matter of fact, I gave up a week ago and I only was able to put together the last bit of it a couple days ago because of how hopeless I felt doing this. As a matter of fact, I was trying to think about what can I, what can we walk away from this presentation with? What what can I give you to feel that we can take an action after this? And I was struggling, y'all. I, I, I was, I even came to the point where I said this might just be one of those presentations where I raise awareness. But we, it was important to feel that it felt hopeless. So it is important to note that in the Constitution for the World Health Organization, they define, they define health as a state of complete physical and mental and social well-being, social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, infirmity. The relationship between mental health and human rights is integral and interdependent. You don't have human rights, you don't have equal rights, your mental health suffers. And I'm here to tell you that my mental health was suffering putting together this presentation. So, now what? And this is the part that actually ended up making me happy. Because part of the reason why this was so exhausting to put together for you was that I was reminded constantly of times in my life when I felt hopeless and powerless, when I was faced with the systems of power that I've discussed previously, and, and left them feeling hopeless and powerless. So in between, just to bring myself back into this presentation, between 2010 and 2011, I was institutionalized and hospitalized multiple times. And in a contributing factor to both was my mental health diagnosis, and of course, my race. It's in Maryland, one of the things that I was talking about previously with when we were discussing this topic, whether or not I should go ahead with this topic, I mentioned, in Maryland, my driver's license always listed me as white, because that was before I got my license before biracial was put back in the census in 2000. And I was always listed as white on my driver's license. Because nobody asked me, they just said he looked pale enough, and I could pass. The when I got arrested as a result of my mental health condition, I was suddenly listed as black in the court record. So when I committed a crime, or I was at least charged with a crime, I was black. And as a result of all of these things, I lost my job, my home and my social supports, I was powerless. I had to move in with my parents in a little town in New Mexico to put my brain back together. I was powerless and I was hopeless. And this entire situation, my life was taken out of my own hands. So, but it's important to remember that you can take that power back. And here's how I did it. In between 2012 and 2015, I sought out community nonprofits, I volunteered with anybody who would let me help out. And of course, if you can't tell them a bit of a talker, I told my story about the experiences that I had with the criminal justice and mental health systems to anybody who would listen. Eventually, I found an organization, NAMI, specifically, but I had challenges with my local NAMI. It was run by primarily affluent white family members, not people who live with conditions and certainly not people of color who had experiences with with that. And I was extremely frustrated, so frustrated that in the early days, I literally flipped a table at a NAMI meeting and stormed out. I don't recommend that. For the record, this is not an endorsement of that. And as per the disclaimer at the beginning, SAMHSA does not endorse that behavior. However, news of that made it out to a local community organization that there was a new guy in town who had these new ideas and he was so passionate, he got so angry, he flipped a table and walked out of a meeting. That organization was all about teaching people how to organize in their community and they taught, they brought me in and trained me to be a community organizer. They, but the biggest thing they taught me was how to manage that passion and anger so that I didn't, you know, flip a table at a meeting. As a result of them working with me for two years, NAMI, again, I came back to NAMI and they were like, you're not gonna flip a table again, are you? And they actually listened to what I had been trying to tell them for the previous years and eventually they put me on their board. I worked my way up that board and by 2017, I was a member of the NAMI National Board, where I now had a direct hand in influence and mental health public policy. And my area of expertise within NAMI is specifically criminal justice reform and access to care and integration of peer supports. So these ideas were that, you know, my story had power. My story was my power and everywhere I go and all the advocacy I do is based off of that story and I saw the impact that it has and I've seen the impact that it has had for my clients who have then become advocates of themselves. And as it moves forward, NAMI, we are built on the idea of stories having power. But the important thing out of that is that I saw that, A, all the things that I went through in 2010 and 2011, which are kind of peeking in the back of my brain right now and making me feel a little emotional, they didn't happen for no reason. And I had a tool to take my power back. So what is the action? What is the good news? What is the walk take away from this presentation that I hope you have? Is that there are agencies everywhere in the country and all of this, this resource list is a list of national agencies. And again, as you can see, they're all hyperlinked. So when you get the PDF, you can click on the link in your computer and they'll take you to the website. Now, it's interesting. I put Faith in Action first because actually it was a Faith in Action agency that trained me as a community organizer. And the important thing to note is that I'm not a spiritual person in the slightest. I know I opened this up with a the title of this is based off of a Bible quote and I know that I mentioned you know faith a couple of times here, but like I'm not a very spiritual person, but the fact of the matter is, they heard my story and they taught me how to leverage that story and use it. The other agencies I've included in here are focused around communities particularly impacted by what's happening in our country today as far as public policy. I, of course, also threw NAMI in here because, hi, y'all, I'm a NAMI representative. I have to occasionally chill out for my agency. But the important thing is that your local NAMI also has legislative advocacy and they do take a mental health focus. All of these agencies are designed about giving power back to the powerless and teaching them how to use the power they truly have. I included one in here for you all, specifically for you to go out and follow up on if you are interested, which is the Association for Community Organization and Social Action. That is actually the professional trade association for community organizers. They are looking for people with trained backgrounds in social treatment and service and support. I'm not wording that well. It's a real good thing I don't have a public presentation to give today or me wording that poorly would be bad. But that is actually more than the others there for you. The rest are there for also your clients. And I wanted to give you the title reference, why I chose the title I did. And yes, it is based off of one of my favorite quotes in the Bible, which is Amos 524, but let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Next to that, I included a picture that I painted. And I painted this picture the day Michelle Obama said she lived in a house built by slaves. And I watched the social media channels attack her for that. And I want to and I wanted to remind people that no, America was built on blood and violence and subjugation. And it's up to us to take that back. What's happening now is the continuation of over 200 years of history and and what's happening in the courts, of course, has been going on for 148 years at least. So but this quote reminds me to never stop fighting and that we have power. So this is where I have the Q&A. I know this was mostly a lot of me dumping information on you and and a lot of just context. This is a lot of context. So I'm going to hold this the Q&A up to whatever it rose in you bring up. And if you have any other questions about community organizing and things like that, I'm happy to do what I can to talk about that as well. And I see Gabriel's back. So what you got for me, man? Well, let me start by saying thank you. We very much appreciate and enjoy you spending time with us so that you can share your story because it is true. Our personal story is both important and impactful. And as individuals think about questions to ask, please do utilize the Q&A function. I do have some questions that kind of sparked my interest as I heard your presentation. So if you're ready for it, I will give you my first question. Okay. All right. So you just mentioned that you're happy to speak a little bit more about what it means to do community organizing. So my question to you is, can you tell us a little bit more about what it means to be a community organizer? Because I think a lot of times people have this misinformation that it just requires a lot of time. And sometimes they may not realize that even a few hours, a couple of hours, an hour here and there can actually really help do more grassroots work and really do more community activism. So can you tell us a little bit more about your take on community organizing? That's a great question because it's true. One of the benefits when I went to become a community organizer was that I was now on disability and I didn't have a full-time job that I had to get back to. And so I had the time to dedicate. So I became one of those full-time community organizers. But let me tell you who I appreciated the most. The people who would take a couple hours out of their day or week to work a table at a county fair, or to do a letter writing campaign, or to send an email, or to even just forward the email that I sent them to somebody else. We knock social justice advocacy, sharing messages on Facebook and things like that. That actually has meaning as long as you back it up and you aren't just sharing memes. I hate memes. But community organizing is all about small nonprofits. And let me tell you, there's nothing they can't use. If you only have three hours a week to answer a telephone at an office, you can really help them out. Because what you're doing in that instance is freeing up those full-timers to go do the work. But the most powerful tool that we have with NAMI is our members who engage with our emails for advocacy when we say, write your local congressman, write your local elected official. All politics are local. So getting engaged with your local civics and your municipalities, that will have a knockdown effect that will affect the whole country. I got started, seriously, advocating for more hospital access in my local community. And just the messaging for that got out and it spread to the work that I do now. So it's everything. It's something as simple as... The simplest and smallest task that you would actually do have the greatest impact that I can think of is volunteering to work a table for half an hour or an hour at a community event. We always need people to do that. But there's nothing you can't offer. I got into it because I had a 20-year career in information systems. So I was all about computers and tech, clearly. And a lot of these organizations didn't have that knowledge or access. So I could just come in and make their computers work better. So if you have a skill that you have, chances are they need it. Perfect. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can. Yes. Okay. Making sure. All right. So second question is, and I'm hoping you can also shed a little light on this for us. So here at the American Psychiatric Association, we also believe the same thing that you echoed in this presentation and many other organizations that you listed is, and that's that everyone's voice is critical. And as such, we do a lot of advocacy work, both at the state and federal level, to really advocate for bills that will better individuals' mental health, their well-being. So have you had the experience of being able to be an expert witness with a physician so that you both could tell your story? If so, how has that received? What are your thoughts on that? Because I think also having the combination of individuals with their personal story, but also the physicians does tend to make it feel stronger and more personable. Thoughts on that? Yeah. One of the things that has always bothered me over the years is that peers, us, the people with the conditions and lived experiences, we tend to get into adversarial relationships with the providers on things, but there are a lot of issues that are bigger than our relationships where we are perfectly matched as allies. And so part of my justice-involved experience involved being kept in solitary confinement. So a lot of the expert testimony that I give nationwide at different legislative bodies is about the impact of being a person in solitary confinement. And on more than a few of those, I'm sitting, well, virtually, thanks to COVID, right next to a provider who is saying, yes, and everything Micah said has a scientific basis. Here's why. You know, and so, and that we always get feedback that our testimony was the most impactful when they just hear the one-two punch of this is what happens. This is how it feels. This is what it's like to be in it. And then to somebody say, and there's a medical basis for what that person just said. So I always love testifying with my partners from the APA and others. I love working with you all. As a matter of fact, Dr. Lisa Dixon and I did a panel with some other presenters at the national conference where we talked about insight. And Dr. Dixon mentioned, you know, all of the, here are the studies about insight and here's the, you know, clinical perspective. And also here's three people at the table who are the people we're talking about. And we, the whole purpose of that presentation was to challenge some of those studies to say like, you know, the wording here is maybe not completely wrong, but it's at the very least reductive. And to have that one-two punch had a serious impact on the audience. That's the feedback that we just kept getting afterwards. So yeah, absolutely. And then I was also going to say, I know you mentioned, and we're not going to get into politics, but the reality is, I think as you alluded and as we know, politics does have a direct impact on the well-being of individuals. One of our speakers that we had earlier on in the series, our focus was around suicide rates. So when we think about everything going on as it's targeting transgender populations, as it's targeting the LGBT population, something that doesn't lie is statistics and statistics keep telling us as the presentation did, that our Latino and African-American young people are more at higher levels to commit suicide and also have suicidal ideation. So I say that, so when we're thinking about mental health public policy, how would you suggest, I know we set the community organizing, is there additional ways that individuals should get more involved in advocating and in pushing for bills that will ultimately have an impact on their mental health and their overall well-being? It's no secret that the suicide rates amongst LGBTQ plus populations are more than double to sometimes peaking at even higher rates than that, than cis hetero populations. And anytime I brought up that to anybody, my immediate follow-up in, and it's obvious as to why. When you have to constantly justify your right to exist, you are, it's, as I said, it's exhausting. And that's one of the biggest frustrations that I have. And that's why in some of the earlier, that one of the resource slides that one of the organizations that put in there was about black trans, the black trans community specifically, because that intersectionality has the highest suicide rate in the country. And so it's important to encourage people to step up and raise their voice. It's important to not guilt them into doing it. Every person I know in these communities has felt pressured to become their own advocate and to become the advocate, the speaker for the whole cause. You've heard the joke a lot of times about a black person being in a room and being expected to speak for all black people. And I'm sure you experienced the same thing. So it's important to encourage and say, yes, remind them they have power and their stories have power. Yes. But also take care of yourself and make sure that if it's too much, it is okay for you to say this is too much and I can't deal with it. There's a reason why I only work with people who know about my mental health background. And it's entirely so I can say, yeah, I'm not doing, I'm not today, I can't. And for the record, I have a lot of plans for the rest of the day that don't involve work because I need to feel better after giving this presentation. So like I'm going out for slurpees. I'm driving to El Paso, which is a 90 mile round trip for a slurpee as a self care. And it's important to remind people that it's okay that they don't have to be the advocates for everyone. Step up as they feel comfortable, volunteer as they feel comfortable. And you know what, this is going to sound bad, but I don't mean it as bad as it sounds. Every organization needs grunts. We all need soldiers. So if you can't be a frontline person who's going to go out and speak and be that person who's putting themselves on the line on the story front, don't. Do the admin stuff in the background, you're helping out in a big way, in a way bigger than I can actually possibly convey. And you're taking care of yourself while you're at it. So Thank you. Thank you. And I know this is going to have me thinking about a slurpee also, but as we, but you did also say you spoke about the self healing process and the having to practice the self care and the self love. So one of the things I know I do want to touch on because I found very interesting in your bio is you're an artist and your art has been featured at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building and you've had three gallery shows and authored multiple books. The last of which was A Peek Inside Illustrated Journeys in Life with Mental Health. So my question to that is, how did you find that to help you with healing, to help you with self care and to express yourself possibly in a different way that just, how was that process and tell us a little bit more. I'm just interested to know because I, just reading, I feel like you're, you pour your heart into your art as a way to heal. Absolutely. That painting I showed you earlier, America's Foundation, is actually the first painting I never completed because I put so much raw emotion into it. The closer it got to getting done, the worse I felt, it was just everything was looking back at me and I had to walk away and I never finished it. But the book, Peek Inside Illustrated Journeys in Life with Mental Illness, I like mental health better as a word, but I was selling it to the general population. So mental illness. The funny thing you mentioned about using that as a tool for healing, I wrote that book as a result of, I had a med interaction that caused my kidneys to fail and I had to suddenly go off all of my medication to prevent that from getting worse. And all of a sudden, all of my symptoms came back in a big, big way. I became super paranoid about that doorknob in the background there. Something about that doorknob was scary, so I wouldn't touch it. And so I couldn't go outside for weeks on end. And people were leaving food at my patio to feed me. And in the middle of that, I was so frustrated that this happened because I followed my doctor's orders that I painted a picture of a statue of a bust of a man crumbling into his pills because I was thinking about the fact that I needed my medications, but what were they costing me? What were they taking away? And the weirdest thing happened. I had been struggling with symptoms for the longest time. And when I did it, I felt my brain piece itself back together. So I did another one and my brain pieced itself back together. And I did another one. I was doing better and better until I actually ran out of ideas. And I'm like, I'm not there yet. So I contacted some of my local peers and friends and a couple of my clients. And I asked, can I use your story? Can I paint your story? And I painted their ideas and put my brain back together. And then I wrote that book. In the six-month recovery window where I was putting my kidneys back together, I wrote that book, all to process everything that had happened. And it was incredibly powerful and healing. And that's why I encourage people to find an outlet. Telling these stories, if you haven't noticed, I do these stories and presentations a lot like a performance. And it's because this is another form of my art. This is another part of my expression, is that this is part of my healing process. Even though it's draining and exhausting, and yes, I'm going to have to do some self-care afterwards, I'm going to feel like I did something good today. And that's important. Hopefully, I did something good today. Evaluations are important, y'all. Fill them out. On that note, I would agree that you absolutely did. And I want to thank you once again, Micah, for spending part of your day with us today. And I know this definitely has been exhausting and draining, but I think we're all going to walk away much better individuals after hearing this presentation and engaging with you because we've learned a lot, we heard a lot, and most of all, you opened up yourself to us. So for that, we thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Of course, not to put you up for more additional work, but if you can pull up the last slide, I can tell everyone how to claim credit. Absolutely. And I'll keep myself on camera this time. I was supposed to be a surprise this time. Yes, please. So as we go to the last slide, how to claim credit, make sure you follow the instructions below, or you can also email learningcenteratpsych.org with any questions. So you've already done the important part, which is attend the virtual event, submit the evaluation next, and then select the claim credits tab, choose a number of credits from the dropdown menu, and then click the claim button. So we want to thank you all again. Thank you, Micah. And of course, thank you to the audience. We very much appreciate your time. And this concludes our presentation today. Thank you all for coming, and thank you for having me.

Micah Pearson

mental health advocate

Supreme Court rulings

marginalized populations

equal rights

mental health and public policy

racial and ethnic minorities

reproductive rights

denied abortions

community organizing