Course Library Intro

IDHA Self-Paced Course Library

This library offers a range of self-paced courses covering a wide range of essential topics in transformative mental health. Courses are designed to integrate tools and knowledge into your practice and daily life.

Most courses were adapted from former live, virtual offerings.

Audience

These courses are open to:

  • Mental health practitioners and care workers of all kinds
  • Academics and researchers
  • Educators
  • Artists and writers
  • Activists and movement leaders
  • Community organizers
  • Family members
  • Students

Platform

All courses are hosted on Mighty Networks, home to IDHA's School for Transformative Mental Health. This virtual community space supports sustained learning, engagement with other students, and access to supplemental resources.

Format

All courses are virtual and self-paced. Courses consist of short video lessons, supplemented by reflection questions and resources. All video lessons are equipped with human-reviewed closed captions.

Length

Courses range from 1-3 hours in length.

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All Available for CE Credit New Free Bundles

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Course Library
Course 1
This course critically examines the shortcomings of the biopsychiatric model in mental health, explores alternative frameworks, and highlights the importance of lived experience in shaping more effective and humane mental health practices.
 Rethinking Mental Health History of the Movement & Alternatives to Biomedical Approaches
Course 2
This course explores the role of trauma in mental health and how psychological distress often arises from adverse experiences. It offers practical, trauma-informed tools, examines peer-led services, and describes models of post-traumatic growth for holistic healing.
 Trauma, Growth & Resilience Redefining Trauma-Informed Practice
Course 3
This course explores creative, non-medical approaches to understanding and describing mental health experiences, offering new language, frameworks, and tools such as Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs) to support personal and community care.
 Dangerous Gifts Beyond Symptom & Cure Mentality
Course 4
This course examines the intersection of mental health and systemic oppression, exploring how historical and ongoing systems of oppression impact marginalized communities. It also emphasizes the importance of an intersectional approach to healing and mental health activism.
 Our Struggles are Intertwined Intersections of Mental Health & Oppression
Course 5
This course offers non-pathologizing frameworks for understanding altered states, introducing tools to support individuals navigating these experiences. It emphasizes the potential for personal and spiritual growth that these states can offer, transcending medicalized understandings of "psychosis."
 Spiritually Transformative Experiences Emergence, Meaning Making & Growth
Course 6
This course explores the Hearing Voices Movement, offering tools and strategies to support those who hear voices while challenging stigmatizing labels and promoting non-medical approaches to improve quality of life.
 Supporting Those Who Hear Voices A Roadmap for Experts by Experience & Experts by Training
Course 7
This course explores the transformative power of grief, offering somatic practice and rituals that help process collective and intergenerational trauma while challenging Western frameworks that disconnect us from our natural human responses to loss and violence.
 Grounding in Grief Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual
Course 8
This course explores how to decolonize mental health by integrating and honoring Indigenous practices and ancestral wisdom. It offers alternative healing approaches that connect us to our lineage and promote collective care and liberation.
 Ancestral Healing Honoring Origins to Form Sacred Futures
Course 9
This course explores restorative and transformative justice practices, offering strategies to create meaningful change in mental health and community work by moving away from punishment-centered paradigms and fostering accountable, healing-centered, and compassionate care systems.
 Transcending the Punishment Paradigm The Promise of Restorative & Transformative Practices
Course 10
This course explores the healing and liberatory potential of art-making in mental health, offering practical tools for using creativity to foster community, connection, and new ways of knowing within and beyond clinical settings.
 Liberatory Art-Making Reimagining Community Care
Course 11
This course explores the concept of "making sanctuary," inviting participants to transform individual and collective wounds into sites of creative inquiry. Rooted in a decolonial analysis, it encourages the decentering of fixed solutions in mental health.
 Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice Putting Wounds to Work
Course 12
This course examines the impact of colonialism and capitalism on marginalized communities, exploring how these systems affect mental health and well-being. It also introduces liberatory practices that foster inclusivity, mutuality, and new ways of being in community.
 Equalizing Power Mental Health and the Creation of the Common
Course 13
This course offers strategies to cultivate trust, intimacy, and consent in personal and collective relationships, and provides tools for accountability, conflict navigation, and building connections that endure across virtual and in-person contexts.
 Nourishing Relationships Trust, Intimacy and Consent
Course 14
This course examines the impact of Western individualism on relationships and mental health, introducing embodiment practices and collective strategies to cultivate a deeper sense of belonging and safety in our communities.
 Centered Belonging Creating Space for Embodied Connection
Course 15
This course examines how to navigate disagreement and conflict within diverse communities. It introduces practical tools for building empathy, understanding power dynamics, and fostering connection through generative conflict to support collective liberation.
 Holding Difference Moving Toward Liberatory Futures Through Conflict
Course 16
This course examines the current state of crisis care, including the impact of the rollout of 988 (the National Suicide Prevention Hotline) while exploring strategies to navigate the crisis care system, protect against coercion, and build community support and healing justice.
 The Crisis Industry How Capitalism, Cops, and Coercion Shape Care Today
Course 17
This course examines harmful mindsets rooted in white supremacy that show up dominant mental health crisis responses, offering alternative approaches and peer support tools to foster compassionate, collaborative care and dismantle power dynamics in crisis situations.
 Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice Visions for a Liberated Crisis Response
Course 18
This course examines culturally grounded mental health practices, focusing on Bapu Trust in India and Sawubona Healing Circles in the United States. It provides strategies to integrate survivor-centered approaches to promote inclusion, autonomy, and community care in other settings.
 Global Grassroots Responses Weaving Together Healing and Social Justice
Course 19
This course explores alternative mental health practices that prioritize autonomy and dignity, discussing care approaches like peer support, respite centers, and warmlines to provide more affirming and supportive crisis care while minimizing harm.
 Alternative Care Approaches Honoring Authenticity and Vulnerable Expression
Course 20
This course explores how to build community capacity for crisis prevention and intervention, emphasizing collective care, mutual aid, and non-carceral alternatives that prioritize self-determination, healing, and compassion.
 Building Communities to Meet Crisis Resourcing Our Relationships
Course 21
This course showcases two innovative programs responding to mental health crises in ways that center community needs and divest from carceral systems. It reminds us of the expertise we all carry, and the power of lived experience.
 Paradigm Shifters Transformative Programs Redefining Crisis Care
Course 22
This class examines the tension between professional ethics and personal values in mental health work, exploring how to practice value-driven crisis care. Participants will be invited to reflect on self-preservation rituals and gain skills to help navigate rigid work environments.
 Creating a Crisis Toolkit Reconciling Personal Values with Professional Ethics
Course 23
This course reimagines crisis as an opportunity for reflection and transformation, exploring inherited notions of crisis and ways to shift from reaction to resourcing. Participants will reflect on what needs to be unearthed, composted, and reimagined in their lives and communities.
 Re-Orienting to Emergency A Slower Urgency
Course 24
This course reimagines crisis response by centering the wisdom of those with lived experience. Participants will explore how peer support and community care can transform approaches to trauma and distress, gaining strategies to build awareness, empathy, and action.
 Embodied Wisdom A Live Experience Showcase
Course 25
This course unpacks and reflects on some of the key assumptions that underpin Global Mental Health and some questions that arise in response. It also recognizes and taps into knowledge developed by people with psychosocial disabilities in the Global South.
 Unsettling Global Mental Health Unpacking Power, Epistemic Justice and Coloniality
Course 26
This course introduces the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, a framework for bringing Indigenous and Western perspectives into dialogue. Through stories of Indigenous healing, it highlights holistic approaches that integrate body, community, and spirit, offering insights for practitioners, activists, and students alike.
 Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing Indigenous Practices for Social and Emotional Wellbeing
Course 26
This course introduces liberation psychology as a framework for transforming unjust social and ecological conditions. Drawing on participatory methodologies and the practice of mutual accompaniment, it offers tools for mental health workers, caretakers, and activists to foster collective well-being and solidarity.
 Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology Widening Circles of Solidarity
 

Course Bundles

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Psychologies of Liberation Bundle


Course 1 Thumbnail Unsettling Global Mental Health
Course 2 Thumbnail Global Grassroots Responses
Course 3 Thumbnail Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing
Course 4 Thumbnail Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology

Originally offered live in Spring 2021, the Psychologies of Liberation training series explored injustices in global mental health and present grassroots, liberatory responses from around the world. Transformative mental health requires challenging ingrained narratives that keep us individually and collectively stuck - narratives that claim some groups of people are inherently superior to others; that we can harm others without harming ourselves; that marginalized people get what they deserve; that widespread abuse is disconnected from trauma; and that the forces creating inequality should be dictating the solutions to it. This series presents an intercontinental offering of scholars, practitioners, and individuals with lived experience sharing analysis and relational practices for the transformative human arts.

Purchase - General ($60) Purchase - Supporter ($120)
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Crossroads of Crisis Bundle


Course 1 Thumbnail The Crisis Industry
Course 2 Thumbnail Shifting Mindset to Shift Practice
Course 3 Thumbnail Alternative Care Approaches
Course 4 Thumbnail Building Communities to Meet Crisis
Course 5 Thumbnail Paradigm Shifters
Course 6 Thumbnail Creating a Crisis Toolkit
Course 7 Thumbnail Re-Orienting to Emergency
Course 8 Thumbnail Embodied Wisdom

Originally offered live from Fall 2022-Spring 2023, the Crossroads of Crisis training series reimagines the crisis continuum – interrogating what crisis is, where it comes from, how to respond to it with curiosity and compassion, and the role of peers, providers, and communities. Building on former IDHA offerings Crisis as Catalyst and Cultivating Community, its learning is grounded in the voices of lived experience and approach the theme of crisis from multiple lenses and dimensions. Drawing inspiration and lessons from current community-based efforts, it provides the opportunity practice how to disrupt paradigms of coercion, create personal codes of ethics, and attune to the needs of those we support in professional and nonprofessional roles.

Purchase - General ($120) Purchase - Supporter ($240)
Save 25%!

Cultivating Community Bundle


Course 1 Thumbnail Equalizing Power
Course 2 Thumbnail Nourishing Relationship
Course 3 Thumbnail Centered Belonging
Course 4 Thumbnail Holding Difference

Originally offered live in Spring 2022, the Cultivating Community training series sought to shine a light on the essential role of community, connection, and relationship in building care systems that center collective liberation. We explored how we can create the conditions for community in a range of diverse settings; discuss community as a form of resistance to oppression; and introduce concrete approaches, tools, and strategies to foster community care in and outside of the formal mental health system.

Purchase - General ($60) Purchase - Supporter ($120)
Course Bundle Section
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Crisis as Catalyst Bundle


Course 1 Thumbnail Grounding in Grief
Course 2 Thumbnail Ancestral Healing
Course 3 Thumbnail Transcending the Punishment Paradigm
Course 4 Thumbnail Liberatory Art-Making
Course 5 Thumbnail Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice

Originally offered live in Fall 2021, the Crisis as Catalyst training series resists calls to return to normal in a supposed post-pandemic world, and invites us to instead center a vision of radical transformation: moving from healing or fixing what is broken to cultivating what could be. This process requires grieving the extraordinary losses we have faced over the last year and across generations; challenging assumptions and occupying liminal spaces; and sitting with our pain and exhaustion as a means to grasp problems firmly at the root. It requires honoring ancestral and Indigenous ways of knowing, rectifying harm, and inviting people to cultivate radical joy to usher in a future shaped by ecological, economic, racial, and healing justice. We introduced an array of healing strategies proliferated by world weavers past and present, as well as practical opportunities to apply knowledge and experiences to our lives and work.

Purchase - General ($75) Purchase - Supporter ($150)

Frequently Asked Questions

  • These are completely self-paced online courses. You decide when you start and when you finish.

  • No prerequisites are required! While some courses may be more advanced or geared toward professionals, all are designed to be accessible to a broad audience. Course descriptions will indicate if any background knowledge might be helpful.

  • We love hearing your feedback on how we can improve our efforts to bring transformative mental health to the public. Shoot us an email at contact@idha-nyc.org and let us know your thoughts. If you disagree with any of the perspectives shared in the course – that’s great! We encourage differing viewpoints and welcome discussion. Feel free to leave a comment in the course, as long as your comments remain respectful and you speak from your own experience.

  • Due to the digital nature of our self-paced courses, all sales are final, and we are unable to offer refunds or exchanges. We encourage you to carefully review the course descriptions before purchasing to ensure they align with your needs.

  • Yes! Some courses in the library are available for Continuing Education (CE) credits. You can use the filter to find CE-eligible courses. Be sure to visit the individual course page for details on CE availability and requirements.

  • After enrolling, you have unlimited access to a course for as long as the course remains available.

  • Yes! All video lessons include human-reviewed closed captions to ensure accessibility for all learners.

  • If you experience technical issues that prevent access to your course, please reach out to us at contact@idha-nyc.org, and we will work with you to resolve the issue.