Session Summaries and a schedule of events will soon be posted on the conference page of our website: VIEW HERE

Gabor Maté (pronunciation: GAH-bor MAH-tay) is a retired physician who, after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in twenty-five languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. His book on addiction received the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection; Scattered: How ADD Originates and What You Can Do About It; and (with Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. To learn more, go to www.drgabormate.com.

Kyra H. Baker (she/her) is the Community Inclusion Specialist with the Temple University Collaborative on Community Inclusion of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities. Kyra has developed interventions for National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)-funded research projects in the areas of supported education and campus engagement, transportation training, and parenting. In Spring 2020, Kyra co-developed and implemented a distance-based intervention supporting individuals with serious mental health issues to identify and reach community participation goals and connect with natural supports while physical distancing due to Covid-19.

In 2020 and 2021, Kyra planned and implemented 5 virtual StorySlams with over 40 storytellers. Kyra is passionate about supporting individuals with serious mental health issues to shift focus from illness and recovery narratives to developing stories of community participation as friends, students, parents, professionals, and partners, just like everyone else.

Kyra holds an MS in Recreational Therapy from Temple University. Her original storytelling work has been produced by First Person Arts, The Philadelphia SoLow Festival, and has been featured on NPR.

Patricia E. Deegan Ph.D. is a principal with Pat Deegan & Associates. For over 30 years Pat has been a thought leader and disruptive innovator in the field of behavioral health recovery. Pat founded a company run by and for people in recovery. The mission: To safeguard human dignity by bringing individual voice and choice to the center of the clinical care team. Toward this end she developed the CommonGround Program that includes the award winning CommonGround software, the online Recovery Library, the CommonGround Academy for peers and practitioners, and the Hearing Distressing Voices Simulation. Since 2009, Pat has worked as a consultant helping to develop and evolve the OnTrackNY model for coordinated specialty care teams for young folks experiencing early psychosis. Pat is an activist in the disability rights movement and has lived her own journey of recovery after being diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. She has held a number of academic appointments, has numerous publications, and has carried a message of hope for recovery to audiences around the world. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Duquesne University.

Shaun McNiff is author of Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression; Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go; Art as Medicine; Art Heals; Depth Psychology of Art; Integrating the Arts in Therapy; and other books. His writings have been widely influential and translated into many languages and he has lectured and taught throughout the world. The recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Journal of Applied Arts and Health for his leadership in advancing art as research and the Honorary Life Member Award of the American Art Therapy Association. He established the first integrated arts in therapy and education graduate training programs at Lesley University from which the field of expressive arts therapy emerged and in 2002 Lesley appointed him as its first University Professor. His lifework is committed to furthering universal access to artistic expression as a source of individual community well-being and understanding.

Peggy Swarbrick, PhD, FAOTA has published and lectured around the country and internationally on wellness promotion models, employment, peer support, and recovery. Her work has focused on a strength based 8-dimensional wellness model to promote recovery from mental health and substance use conditions. She is well known for collaborating with the peer community and family groups to identify and address social determinants that present barriers to recovery, such as homelessness, poverty and under/unemployment. Peggy has developed many peer support certification courses, a peer health navigator training and peer wellness coaching practice model. She has created health promotion initiatives and also wellness self-care programs for caregiver’s families and youth. She has made significant contributions to the body of literature in occupational therapy, nursing and community behavioral health care practice. As a co-investigator, consultant, and collaborator on Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute grants as well as National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, National Institute of Mental Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, she has contributed to significant research and been a lead for developing trainings and intervention manuals for many of these projects. Peggy was a co-investigator on Perspectives on the International Classification of Diseases (11th revision); Using lived experience to improve mental health diagnoses in the United States: INCLUDE – US Study. Peggy worked for many years at the Collaborative Support Programs of New Jersey Wellness Institute, a peer operated organization.

Jacquese Armstrong, former Coordinator of NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Expressive Arts Network, is the content creator for the NAMI NJ Expressive Arts Café, a virtual interactive expressive arts workshop emphasizing self-care and mental wellness through an artistic perspective. “Café-goers” participate in real-time art projects and discuss their projects and feelings about the process. In addition, Jacquese has been the host for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Expressive Arts Poetry contest since its inception in 2013.

Jacquese is the author of blues legacy (2019), a book of poetry and was the recipient of the 2019 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. In 2015, she was a recipient of the Ambassador Award from the State of New Jersey Governor’s Council on Mental Health Stigma for promoting wellness and recovery and reducing stigma through the arts.

She has presented at several conferences including interNational Association of Peer Supporters (iNAPS) and Alternatives, and she was a guest on the NAMI STAR Center Hear me now podcast. Recently, she was a cast member of TMI Project’s storytelling performances Black Stories Matter: Every Word Spoken, Alone Together stories of COVID-19 in quarantine, and their Barnard College performance.

Her work has been published in midnight & indigo, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, OC87 Recovery Diaries, Ourselves Black and Stellium, among others.

She was the recipient of a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toledo, Toledo, OH in Journalism.

Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in private practice, Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and a former instructor, Harvard Medical School. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in trauma treatment at the Victims of Violence Program, Cambridge Hospital, and was an instructor and supervisor at the Trauma Center from 1995-2011. Considered an international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma (2015) and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017) and Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021). She is best known for her work on integrating newer neurobiologically-informed interventions into traditional psychotherapy approaches.  More information can be found on her website: www.janinafisher.com.