Shery Mead had her first encounter with the mental health system as a teenager. It was a time when most people were over-medicated, shock treatments were routine, and no one even asked about trauma and abuse. She was offered life in a halfway house and a limited future. Needless to say, it was not much to look forward to. Shery began, instead, to put her creative energy into music, allowing her to “say that which could not be said.” Though this worked reasonably well for a number of years, the deep shame, fear, powerlessness and sense of “otherness” finally caught back up with her, and she ended up back in the system. Neither the culture nor the prognoses had changed much. She fell into leading the life of a “mental patient.”
Finally, when loss of custody of her children was threatened (based simply on psychiatric diagnosis), she decided she’d had enough. It was then that she realized that she and many others had a choice: the choice of saying “no more.” Soon after, Shery started a peer organization whose focus was specifically “unlearning the mental patient role.” Everything changed after that. She developed training for judges and lawyers about making reasonable custody decisions in cases where one parent has a psychiatric diagnosis; she developed groups for women trauma survivors using music to speak out; she created New Hampshire’s first peer-run crisis respite program; and she started training mental health professionals and peer support workers locally, nationally, and internationally. You can read more of Shery’s story in her article, IPS: A Personal Retrospective.
Chris has worked in mental health user/survivor politics and peer groups in New Zealand and internationally for the last ten years. Although initially employed in mental health services as manager of a Community Mental Health service, an unexpected promotion to an “out” service user via commitment to a psychiatric ward caused her to see and value the power of peer support. The most valuable contributions to her recovery, she realized, came from those who weren’t paid to be there: her fellow in-patients. This realization, along with the losses associated with a loss of job, friends and self-respect, fuelled the anger and passion that drove her to pursue service-user activism at local, regional, national and international levels.
Chris worked as an advisor to New Zealand mental health services, held lead roles in the “Like Minds Like Mine” national anti-discrimination campaign, conducted research for the NZ Mental Health Commission, and worked in an advisory capacity for both the Mental Health Commission and the Ministry of Health in New Zealand. In latter years, she worked as a member of the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations, developing the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She also served on the board for the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, and assisted in the development of peer-run crisis respites in a number of countries. For most of the past decade, Chris has been promoting, developing, and providing training in Intentional Peer Support.
Until 2020, Lisa was coordinating operations for Intentional Peer Support in New Zealand. In 2020, she joined the IPS Central team to support the IPS hubs, coordinate training and generally administer operations. Lisa became a Co-Director alongside Chris Hansen and Shery Mead in January 2022.
Lisa is a proud Scot and has set up, coordinated and trained peer communities internationally for 20 years. Lisa became an IPS trainer in 2016, first organisationally, then went on to facilitate training and co-reflections for the IPS hub in New Zealand then IPS Central.
Lisa was a Winston Churchill fellow in 2013, a Yale Let(s) LEAD fellow in 2019 and is now currently an MSc in Mad Studies student. Lisa is a solo adult raising 2 small global citizens and has a jet setting kiwi born cat called Shadow.
Calvin (he/him/his) was introduced to Intentional Peer Support in 2012 after being hired into his first peer support role at Pathways Vermont in its Housing First program. The IPS emphasis on centering relationship and sharing power resonated with the values and politics of mutual aid and community care that had been central to Calvin’s previous experiences of peer support as an organizer with the Icarus Project (which later became the Fireweed Collective) in NYC. He went on to work for Vermont Psychiatric Survivors as a peer advocate on psychiatric units, later as VPS’s director of training, and more recently as the Franklin County community coordinator for the Wildflower Alliance. Since 2020, Calvin has been working with IPS Central to develop its virtual curriculum as well as the QIPS version of the Core training (aka Intentional Queer Support).
Brittyn Calyx (she/her or they/them) is an IPS trainer living in Teejop, otherwise known as Madison, WI, USA, which is the traditional land of the Ho-Chunk.
When Brittyn first participated in Intentional Peer Support core training in 2014, it spoke to her experience as a psychiatric survivor and as someone looking to relate with others in ways more grounded in a genuine mutual understanding. For about a decade, Brittyn has worked in various peer support roles and leadership roles at peer-run organizations, peer support programs, and peer-run respites in Wisconsin and Massachusetts. She believes that we can move towards meaningful social change whether we are working within or outside of existing systems, but that it starts with how we choose to be in relationship with one another.
Today, Brittyn devotes her efforts towards nurturing communities based in expressly relational frameworks of peer support. With this intention, Brittyn is pleased to have begun serving as Operations Coordinator with Intentional Peer Support in August of 2022. Brittyn finds meaning and fulfillment in foraging and gardening, linguistic and musical pursuits, being in community with others at the intersections of madness and queerness, organizing alongside fellow anti-war military veterans, and co-parenting an amazing kid.
Amanda was first introduced to IPS when she was working as a young person of color peer support group facilitator during the pandemic and was lucky enough to be core-trained in 2020. Amanda began working with the IPS central team shortly after and has recently become a trainer in 2022. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, raised in Toronto, Canada, and living in Manchester, England- Amanda loves to meet and connect with people from all intersectional paths and diverse cultures. IPS resonates with her so deeply as she often reflects on what communities of color and young people need and finds that IPS meets their need for mutuality, connection, and collectivism better than any clinical service she has witnessed or engaged with. If it’s not evident already, Amanda is most passionate about accessible and culturally applicable mental health and peer support for the global majority, race and gender discourse, sustainable fashion, and intersectional environmentalism. When Amanda is trying to unwind or connect with herself you can find her headfirst in a novel, hosting a dinner party and trying out a new cuisine on her guests, or repurposing old clothes.