Heart Forward Conversations from the Heart

Send a text  This interview will regale the history of a mental health pilot from the early 90’s that remains as relevant today as the day it was started.   Back in the day, the Wright-Bronzan-McCorquodale Act of 1988 (known as AB 3777) funded – from the state’s general fund -- three Integrated Service Agency programs for mentally ill consumers.    The most well-known of these was MHA’s The Villag...

Send a text  John Foot is a professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol in the U.K.  He is an expert on the life of Dr. Franco Basaglia, the visionary psychiatrist whose lasting impact on the Italian mental health system continues to inspire the world. We will explore Professor Foot’s journey into this avocation, which was sparked by  the chance viewing the film San Clemente (...

Send a text Guyton Colantuono is the executive director of Project Return Peer Support Network , a position he has held since 2014.  He has spent more than 25 years working in the field of mental health and has led a multitude of programs including those addressing homeless outreach and shelter, transition-aged youth and employment development. He has an unwavering belief that “people are people f...

Send a text Dr. Tom Insel is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and an influential voice in the national conversation that is gaining momentum around the failures of the American mental health system and the need to do better for the humans that are suffering as a result.  His new book, released in February 2022, is a worthy read, Healing:  Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health.   In this ep...

Send a text Savanah Walseth is a student at Loyola Law School and was most recently a program manager for the L.A. County Department of Health “Housing for Health” Program.  At a young age, she is guided by both lessons learned “in the trenches” given her experience in homeless outreach and engagement for People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), but also in programmatic work managing the COVID respon...

Send a text   Lee Davis is currently the chair of the Alameda County Mental Health Advisory Board.  In her official bio , she indicates that she is a Civil Engineer and Journeyman Electrician by profession.  She comes to her work on the Advisory Board as a woman with lived experience of a mood disorder.   In this interview, we explore three themes about which Lee is passionate:   1.      The case...

Send a text I am grateful for good advice I received when I started this podcast in the summer of 2020:  break your podcast into seasons.    For a small operation like Heart Forward, this allows for breathing room and the opportunity to plan and curate guests that are worth listening to!  So, we’ve taken a six-month break since our last episode was uploaded in August 2021.    We are ready to launc...

Send a text This episode tackles the gnarly tangle known as our public mental health funding system.     So many questions I had.  Why is there a chronic shortage of mental health treatment beds at every step of the continuum?  Why do people get released too early from the hospital when they would benefit from long-term care?  Why are mental health clinics limited in the services they can provide...

Send a text   Jackie Lacey served as District Attorney for Los Angeles County from 2012 to 2020.    She was both the first woman and the first black person to  serve in this important role.   A District Attorney is an elected official, and their role is to represent the people in prosecuting crimes in the county.   In 2014, DA Lacey initiated a committee to look at the nexus of the criminal justic...

Send a text In May 2021, five former directors of the regional mental health departments in Friuli Venezia Giulia  issued a letter to sound the alarm that “the Trieste mental health model is under threat.”   That letter was translated into multiple languages, and started the chain of events that are unfolding with respect to raising awareness and voices to advocate for protection of a system that...

Send a text Anthony Ruffin is a gifted and compassionate crisis worker who relentlessly seeks to establish trust with  the most vulnerable people living on the streets.  His career spans working with both nonprofit organizations and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.  He gives homage to a mentor who many were privileged to know during her amazing and courageous life of caring and...

Send a text Rarely has such a diverse group of people been convened to discuss innovation in the jail setting.  This panel occured on April 22, 2021, and was co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Social Medicine and Humanities and Heart Forward LA. The power of Zoom – captured as an audio file for this podcast – presented an opportunity to hear about the origins and outcomes of a collaboration betwe...

Send a text 2020 will go down in history for many things, including the significant push for a diversion of mental health related calls from law enforcement to a different model.  The CAHOOTS program, initiated in Eugene, Oregon, has captured the imagination of many throughout the country who are looking for a tested approach which shifts the burden to a peer-led team.   CAHOOTS stands for Crisis...

Send a text Vincenzo Passante is a psychologist who lives in London but hails from Trieste, Italy.  He was raised and educated in Trieste, which gives him a unique vantage point to contribute given the mission of this podcast.    In this conversation,  we compare and contrast the system in Trieste against the vision behind mainstream mental health care in the UK. Vincenzo left the British National...

Send a text Alex Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, and received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. He is writing a book, tentatively entitled "Mental States," that examines why people with similar illnesses have very different trajectories between institutions of care and control in France and the United States....

Send a text Barbara Wilson, LCSW, has had a distinguished career in social service and helping people for over 50 years.   She is well-known in Los Angeles County as a tireless advocate for improved services to people coping with serious mental illness and the families who care for them.  She also is credited for being one of the first in the state to sound  the alarm approximately seven years ago...

Send a text We ended Season One as the pandemic held its grip on our country in the middle of December.  Now, a little over four months later, the sun is shining more brightly.  There is a vaccine.   The scary Covid surge has abated and we have a functioning government that is making public health,  returning to school and jumpstarting the economy  a priority. So, I am ready to return to our conve...

Send a text This is the second of a two-part conversation with  Dr. Roberto Mezzina and Dr. S. P. Sashidharan that brings Season One of this podcast to a close. Roberto  joins from Trieste Italy where he served for 40 years in the Dipartimento di Salute Mentale, and most recently headed their world-renowned mental health system.  Dr. S.P. Sashidharan calls in from Glasgow  and both were part of a...

Send a text  There is much to be gleaned from this very rare opportunity to have two extremely thoughtful and committed psychiatrists in the same Zoom room.    Dr. Roberto Mezzina joins from Trieste Italy where he served for 40 years in the  Dipartimento di Salute Mentale , and most recently headed their world-renowned mental health system.  Dr. S.P. Sashidharan calls in from Glasgow  and both wer...

Send a text Far too often in American communities, people living with mental illness are marginalized from community supports and experience the debilitating impacts of social isolation, loneliness  and even the downward spiral into homelessness or incarceration.   Imagine the countervailing impact of a welcoming place to go – where everyone knows your name – as the theme from “Cheers” reminded us...

Send a text Miriam Feldman – one of the strongest women I know -- recounts her journey as the mother of a son struggling with schizophrenia.  She points out that as a mother, you tend to worry about child abduction or car accidents.  Nothing prepares you for serious mental illness.   From her book:   “This is the story of how mental illness unspools an entire family…it exposes the shortfalls of ou...

Send a text David Israelian joins Kerry Morrison in a conversation that explores his passion about the importance of work, vocational rehabilitation, and purpose for people living with a mental illness in our communities.    David is the founder and CEO of Peer Mental Health and co-founder and CTO of Painted Brain.    Painted Brain has developed an effective clubhouse model for art, media, and tec...

Send a text Imagine if your job was to live 24/7 with mentally ill inmates at L.A. County Twin Towers.  The L.A. County Jail system is arguably is the largest mental institution in America with close to 5,000 inmates incarcerated.   In this interview, we talk with Craigen Armstrong and Adrian Berumen who have lived embedded in the Forensic Inpatient Program (FIP) Step down unit  for over three yea...

Send a text  Dr. Dave Pilon talks with Kerry about his journey through the world of community-based mental health.   In talking with him, one gets a sense of how our life experiences, over decades, can come full circle to tie everything together.  Most recently,  Dr. Pilon was the author of the proposal outlining a bold five-year mental health pilot, submitted to the state of CA in 2019,  inspired...

Send a text Liberation psychologist Dr. Mary Watkins is the co-founder of Pacifica Graduate Institute ’s MA/PhD specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies in Santa Barbara.  Her 2019 book, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons , challenges us to come alongside people in relationships grounded in “horizontality, interdependence, and potential mutuality....