How do we grieve what has been taken from us while honoring and unearthing what endures?
Registration is now open for Archeologies of Grief!
Series Overview
IDHA’s 2026 training series, Archeologies of Grief: Unearthing Our Wisdom, is for those interested in understanding what has been stolen or lost while being supported by intentional grief practices and wisdom reclamation. Whether you're working in clinical spaces, organizing communities, supporting loved ones, or navigating your own lived experience, this space offers frameworks, practices, and community centered around honoring the complexity of grief.
Grief is everywhere, especially now, and yet many of us are never taught how to hold it. Dominant western paradigms tend to rush, polish, and hide grieving practices, leaving little room to process the pain inflicted by those same forces. All of us have lost something at the hands of structures of domination, and for communities most harmed, grief, remembrance, and reclamation practices are transformative.
This series offers space to explore grief through disability justice, decolonial, relational, and embodied frameworks. Our faculty will draw on a range of practices to help you engage grief more fully – in yourself, in your clients, and in your communities. Across three participatory classes, we will examine topics including neurodivergent and disabled grief, epistemicide and the suppression of indigenous and lived wisdom, and alternatives to dominant Western grief paradigms rooted in collective care and embodied practice.
Together we will engage questions of survival, adaptation, and remembrance while developing more culturally responsive and justice-oriented approaches to supporting grief in ourselves, our communities, and our work.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Disabled and neurodivergent ways of grieving, adapting, and surviving
The reclamation and remembering of indigenous and lived ways of knowing
What embodied, collective, and culturally grounded grief practices offer in contrast to dominant Western frameworks
SKILLS YOU’LL GAIN
Support disabled and neurodivergent communities in navigating grief
Develop a culturally responsive practice that values diverse ways of knowing
Support yourself, others and communities in transformative grief practices
Schedule
Recording: Please note that all main sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants, in case you aren’t able to show up live. However, if you want to receive CEs for the classes you must attend live.
Accessibility: ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided.
Date and Time |
Course Title and Faculty |
|
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, August 20, 2026 6-8:30 pm EST |
Resisting Epistemicide: Restoring Indigenous and Lived Wisdom for Grief Care
Elmina Bell and Evan Auguste, PhD | ENROLL |
| Sunday, July 13, 2025 12-2:30 pm EST |
Between Resistance & Complicity: The Role of Providers in Transforming Care
Vivianne Guevara and Hel Spandler | ENROLL |
| Sunday, August 3, 2025 12-2:30 pm EST |
Grappling with the Biomedical Model: The Case for a Paradigm Shift
Rupi Legha and Robert Whitaker | ENROLL |
| Sunday, August 24, 2025 12-2:30 pm EST |
The Politics of Regulation: Knocking the Nervous System Off Its Pedestal
Rae Johnson and Nkem Ndefo | ENROLL |
| Sunday, September 14, 2025 12-2:30 pm EST |
What Emerges in Dialogue: Relational Practice & the Ethics of Uncertainty
Charmaine Harris and Russell Razzaque | ENROLL |
“I appreciate the willingness to grow together in the space — the recognition that we all come with lives rich with experience, and we are capable of co-building the future as far away as possible from state and interpersonal violence, towards collective and community care.”
— PAST IDHA training participant
Resisting Epistemicide:
Restoring Indigenous and Lived Wisdom for Grief Care
THURSDAY AUGUST 20, 2026 • 6-8:30 pm EST
2.25 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
This course explores epistemicide—the systemic suppression of indigenous, lived, and non-dominant ways of knowing through colonial, psychiatric, and institutional forces—and examines the impacts of this loss on grief, identity, and community well-being. Participants will consider how dominant Western mental health frameworks may overlook or devalue Indigenous, cultural, and experiential ways of knowing, and examine the implications for clinical and peer support practices. Through remembrance practices, collective grieving rituals, and Indigenous-informed approaches to healing, participants will explore cultural frameworks for supporting complex and intergenerational grief.
Learning objectives:
Identify Indigenous and culturally rooted ways of knowing that have been marginalized through processes of epistemicide and describe the potential impacts of this loss on grief, identity, and healing.
Describe and participate in experiential Indigenous-informed therapeutic interventions and discuss considerations for their ethical and culturally responsive application.
Recognize how grief may be expressed through anger, resistance, and other culturally meaningful responses, and identify approaches for holding space within clinical and peer support settings.
Apply principles of culturally responsive and trauma-informed care when supporting grief experiences shaped by historical, cultural, and intergenerational loss.
Elmina Bell is an Indigenous African Psycho-Spiritual Practitioner. Their work as a trained trauma-informed peer support facilitator, crisis/refuge worker, astrologer, sound healer and medium, is guided by knowledge systems of her ancestors and Disability Justice and Healing Justice principles.
Evan Auguste, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a major area of focus in forensic psychology at Fordham University in 2022. Auguste is a 2014 graduate of Middlebury College. His identities as a Haitian-African American man have informed his work on examining how the U.S.’s history of anti-Blackness has shaped psychological realities both in and outside of the country’s borders. He is the director of the A.S.I.L.I. Collective and recently edited the volume The Carceral State, Forensic Psychology, and Black Resistance: “Let Them Not Be Forgotten”, which outlines the theoretical and ethical commitments for forensic psychologists in the struggle for Black liberation and details areas of focus for practice and research.
Between Resistance & Complicity:
The Role of Providers in Transforming Care
Sunday, July 13, 2025 • 12-2:30 pm EST
2.25 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
For generations, providers have challenged the harms of the mental health system and reimagined what care could be. From Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary critique of colonial psychiatry in Algeria to Franco Basaglia’s abolition of Italy’s asylum system and the radical therapeutic communities that emerged across Europe and the U.S., radical figures have offered bold visions that transcend dominant models. These lineages remind us that providers have long been both agents of control and potential catalysts for change. Today, as more mental health providers are called to reckon with their roles within systems of oppression, these histories offer vital lessons about what it means to resist, transform, and build anew.
This class will explore provider efforts to shift practice and consciousness both within and beyond the mental health system. Faculty will examine historical movements such as democratic psychiatry and contemporary efforts to bridge social work with abolition, while highlighting the role of publications like Asylum magazine in fostering democratic knowledge-making and collective critique. Through personal storytelling, and drawing from restorative justice frameworks, we’ll explore how providers can navigate the tensions between complicity and resistance. Participants will be invited to consider what it means to hold liberatory commitments while working within institutional settings, and how to center lived experience in the pursuit of transformative mental health care.
Learning objectives:
Identify key figures and movements that have advanced liberatory approaches to mental health, including efforts toward deinstitutionalization
Examine how providers have functioned both as agents of control and catalysts for change, and the implications of this dual role
Assess the role of survivor-led media and collective platforms, such as Asylum magazine, in reshaping mental health narratives and power dynamics
Apply restorative and transformative justice principles to contemporary mental health practice, with attention to accountability and repair
Explore strategies for aligning professional practice with liberatory values
Vivianne Guevara has been a restorative justice practitioner and facilitator for 10 years and a social worker and mitigation specialist in public defense for over 17 years. Vivianne comes from a family of farmworkers, faith workers, and social justice workers. She strives to honor their legacy and that of her ancestors through a life of service. Vivianne continues to learn through teaching others and by providing opportunities that promote community and healing.
Hel Spandler (they/them) is Professor of mental health politics at the University of Lancashire, UK; Editor of Asylum, the magazine for democratic psychiatry; one of the lead editors of the International journal of Mad Studies and Principal Investigator of the madzines project.
Grappling with the Biomedical Model:
The Case for a Paradigm Shift
Sunday, August 3, 2025 • 12-2:30 pm EST
2.25 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
In this critical moment of institutional collapse and political attack, there is a growing need to grapple with the biomedical model’s dominance in mental health care – and its function as a smokescreen covering up its historical roots in slavery, its use as an instrument of colonization, and its reinforcement of white supremacy. Related concepts in mental health equity work e.g. cultural humility, structural competency, and the “access to care” narrative) promise progress but often fail to reckon with the deep-rooted histories of systemic oppression, surveillance, and carcerality embedded within the field. As public institutions like SAMHSA and NIMH are dismantled, we are invited to move beyond existing frameworks and reimagine care humanity, relationality, and political consciousness.
Through personal narrative, historical analysis, and visionary practice, this class offers an opportunity to critically examine the biomedical model and raise fundamental questions about the path forward at a time of crossroads for the mental health field. Faculty will present research demonstrating the model’s long-standing failure to improve outcomes, and highlight ongoing efforts to abolish coercive mental health practices such as psychiatric restraints, challenge the carceral logics embedded in mental health systems, establish anti-racist clinical standards, and critically interrogate mandated reporting. Participants will be invited to examine how these shifts support a departure from medicalized models and deepen their own commitment to building ethical, justice-aligned forms of care.
Learning objectives:
Critically analyze the biomedical model as a political and historical construct rather than a neutral framework for care
Identify how mainstream mental health narratives like “access to care,” “cultural humility,” “structural competency,” and “global mental health” can obscure histories of systemic violence
Reflect on the relationship between mental health systems and the carceral state, including the use of restraints, mandated reporting, and involuntary treatment
Explore possibilities for creating new care practices grounded in autonomy, dignity, and self-determination
Practice unlearning professional socialization that perpetuates systemic harm in order to support anti-racist, non-carceral clinical practice
Rupi Legha, MD is a psychiatrist, independent scholar, and founder of the Antiracism in Mental Health Fellowship. She brings both heart and rigor to her work, taking her role as Dr. Legha seriously while staying deeply connected to who she is as Rupi. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and double board-certified in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, her work reimagines mental healthcare through a lens of humanity, justice, and collective liberation across generations.
Robert Whitaker is the author of five books, three of which tell of the history of psychiatry. In 2010, his Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness won the U.S. Investigative Reporters and Editors book award for best investigative journalism. He is the founder of madinamerica.com, a website that features research news and blogs by an international group of writers interested in “rethinking psychiatry.”
“Interesting contrast of facilitation in terms of a more academic vs. on-the-ground perspective that complemented each other really well. I liked the way facilitators shared space with one another. The topics were right up my alley and so relevant to my lived experience and current struggles in life and in community. I adored chatting with classmates too and sharing vulnerability."
— Past IDHA training participant
Pricing Tiers
What you get: |
Reduced/Member $30/ class |
General $60/ class |
Supporter $85/ class |
| 2.5-hour live class session | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Class recording and resource list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access to IDHA's virtual learning community on Mighty Networks | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complementary CE credits (2.25 per class) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Subsidize another participant and sustain IDHA's ongoing training program | ✓ |
We love organizing these classes and we’re committed to keeping them as accessible as possible. At the same time, there’s a lot that goes into making them happen. As we navigate a shifting and uncertain funding landscape and move toward becoming more community-sustained, we’ve made a small increase to our live series registration fees this year. Your registration helps cover the cost of compensating our faculty, providing live ASL interpretation and accurate captioning, and maintaining the tech platforms that keep classes running smoothly.
Scholarships
If cost is a barrier, we don’t want that to be the reason you can’t join us. We are also offering full and partial scholarships to the entire series. Our Scholarship Program is for mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority.
Deadline to apply: June 13
Continuing Education Credits
IDHA is pleased to offer this series for Continuing Education (CE) credits.
11.25 CE credits for Psychologists, Social Workers, Counselors, Therapists, and Physicians are available at the General and Supporter Rate only, for no additional cost.
11.25 CE credits for New York Peer Specialists are available at all price tiers, for no additional cost.
In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by Amedco LLC and Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA). Amedco Joint Accreditation #4008163. Certificates are made available after the class is over.
As a training institute that values lived experience as highly as professional training, IDHA recognizes the way that the credentialing system enforces a culture of professionalism and devalues lived experience. At the same time, we believe it is a radical act to offer our training content for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.
FAQ
What’s unique about IDHA’s approach?
We value lived experience as highly as professional training, so each course will be led by both a mental health clinician as well as someone who identifies as a survivor, a mental health service user, and/or someone who has experienced a mental health crisis. This will ensure participants receive holistic and nuanced perspectives.
Who is this series for?
This course is for mental health professionals, including but not limited to: clinicians, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, peer specialists, recovery support specialists, housing specialists, nurse practitioners and medical professionals, students. and anyone who works or plans to work with and around people who experience mental health-related issues.
Where are the classes held?
Classes will be held virtually via Zoom. Be sure to download the Zoom software onto your computer in advance of the training!
Are scholarships available?
IDHA will award a set of full and partial scholarship positions to mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority. Learn more about our Scholarship Program here (applications due June 13).
Are these classes accessible?
Live ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided for all eight class sessions.
Do I have to show up right at the time advertised for the class?
Yes, this is a live training so please be sure you are available at that time. All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after. Please note that all sessions begin at 12 pm EST.
Will I have the opportunity to interact with faculty?
Yes, each live training will provide the opportunity to interact with the faculty. You can also interact with many faculty members on Mighty Networks.
What is your cancellation policy?
For any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.