Sera Davidow - Trusting People as Experts of Themselves
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2022
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sera Davidow is a filmmaker, activist, advocate, author, and mother of two very busy kids. As a survivor of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse as a child and relationship violence as an adult, Sera has faced many challenges throughout her own healing process, including many ups and downs with suicidal thoughts, and self-injury. At present, she spends much of her time working as Director of the Wildflower Alliance (formerly known as the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community), which includes Afiya Peer Respite, recently recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of about two dozen exemplary, rights-based programs operating across the world. She also serves on several boards including the Massachusetts Disability Law Center (DLC) Board of Directors, the DLC's Council Against Institutional and Psychiatric Abuse (CAIPA), as an advisory board member for the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health (NCDVTM), and as a founding Board member of Hearing Voices USA. You can learn more about Sera and her work in an April, 2018 article in Sun Magazine.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Karin Gerbert, and I'm the arts editor at MIA. |
| 0:19.0 | And this interview we're doing is a part of the Suicide Hotline Transparency Project, |
| 0:26.2 | which was born out of the belief that creating transparency and public access |
| 0:30.5 | around suicide hotline intervention and call tracing policies should be a priority. |
| 0:36.4 | And we're interviewing Sarah David O from the Wildflower Alliance warmline. |
| 0:44.1 | And the project that we're doing includes beyond these podcasts, includes other ways that you can participate, |
| 0:51.5 | where we have a poll around perceptions of intervention policies and suicide |
| 1:00.3 | hotlines. We have a directory of hotlines that we're trying to make that collects hotlines |
| 1:05.9 | that do not trace or intervene without consent. And you can visit Madden America's website to find out more ways to participate. |
| 1:13.6 | Also, don't want to forget, because I am the arts editor, that there is a call for art out around |
| 1:19.6 | suicidal distress, re-envisioning suicidal distress. |
| 1:22.6 | It's called careful gestures, so that call for art is out there too. |
| 1:26.6 | So I just wanted to put all that out there |
| 1:28.3 | up front in this interview before Sarah introduces herself. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you so much for |
| 1:35.1 | your time today. And can you tell us just a little bit about yourself? Sure. Thanks for having me |
| 1:41.7 | as well. So I am a part of the Wildflower Alliance leadership team, which used to be known as the Western Mass Recovery Learning community. And part of that is a peer support line that we have, but we also have a number of other offerings throughout our community. In addition to that, I'm also a founding member of the Hearing Voices USA |
| 2:05.0 | board of directors. And I love to write and publish a number of articles on Matt in America as well. |
| 2:13.0 | I like to think of myself as a writer, filmmaker, activist, and a mom. |
| 2:19.5 | Wonderful. |
| 2:20.4 | Wonderful. |
| 2:21.6 | That's quite the, that's quite a lot of things going on there. |
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