Peer Support and Resistance - Becky Brasfield’s Vision for Mental Health Justice

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Anxiety, Mental Health, Benzo, Science, Hearingvoices, Psychology, Antipsychotic, Mentalhealth, Depression, Panicattack, Psychosis, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Psychiatry, Ssri, Antidepressant

4.8 • 201 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Becky Brasfield has emerged as a formidable advocate for change in the complex landscape of mental health care. A certified recovery support specialist and policy researcher at the Human Services Research Institute, Ms. Brasfield has dedicated her career to elevating the voices of service users and dismantling systemic inequities. Her lived experience with psychosis, combined with her leadership in peer support, has made her a powerful critic of traditional psychiatric models that often marginalize those they aim to help.

Her resume includes service as president of the NAMI Illinois Alliance of Peer Professionals, the state’s first peer professional association, and recognition as one of Crain’s Notable Black Leaders and Executives. She has been a fellow with both the IL Care and HSRI Behavioral Health Policy programs and was appointed Commissioner of the Southeast Expanded Mental Health Services Program.

But Ms. Brasfield’s work is as personal and political as it is professional. In this interview, she speaks with Mad in America’s Ayurdhi Dhar about her path to recovery, the harmful impacts of medical gaslighting, and why the future of mental health justice depends on centering the expertise of those with lived experience.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:13.4	Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Madden America. Our guest today is award-winning recovery leader, Becky Brassfield.
0:21.5	Ms. Brassfield is a policy researcher and certified recovery support specialist whose work is based in Chicago.
0:28.1	She currently works as a policy researcher for Human Services Research Institute.
0:32.9	Ms. Brassfield is a peer support specialist for community counseling centers of Chicago, where she provides
0:38.0	recovery support services and professional facilitation training programming.
0:43.0	She also served recently, actually, as president of the NAMI, Illinois Alliance of
0:48.9	Peer Professionals, the state of Illinois' first peer professional association. Becky, welcome to Madden America.
0:56.4	Thank you. It's great to be here. So Becky, you have written about a diverse range of topics
1:00.9	from a practical guide for recovery model practitioners to physics. But I want to begin closer
1:07.7	to your own personal experience, if you don't mind. So could you briefly
1:12.3	tell us about your lived experience of living with psychosis? Absolutely. My lived experience is
1:19.8	about illness and recovery, I like to say. I have a schizoaffective condition and it's a severe
1:26.8	condition when untreated. And it's a combination of
1:30.1	schizophrenia and bipolar illness. And for me, getting a proper diagnosis was important to me
1:39.1	just in the sense that I needed to be honest with myself about what exactly I was confronted with in my
1:47.4	experience. So for me, my lived experience, it didn't necessarily have to come from a medical
1:55.5	provider giving me that diagnosis because I went through a lot of self-exploration of figuring out what is my
2:02.6	correct diagnosis myself and also getting that affirmed by a professional. So I'm a very strong
2:10.8	believer in self-exploration of understanding oneself as a part of my lived experience. I was hospitalized two or three times
2:21.1	in a psychiatric unit. I was incarcerated twice for my mental illness because the delusions
2:28.9	were severe enough where I became out of control. And so I received mental health probation. But my lived
	...

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