Okay, so can we get real here for maybe a hot minute?
This past year and a half has pushed so many of us to the brink in a lot of different ways.
Relationships, work, physical and mental health.
It has tested nearly every system, every thought, belief, tool, practice, and resource that we rely on to find peace and ease and soulless hope, resilience, and maybe even a little bit of grace.
And over the years, we have had the great fortune to be able to sit down with many leading voices and innovators in the world of mental health to learn from their lives, from their stories, their experience and expertise.
And today, we are sharing insight from four of those visionaries with you.
So we start off with Doctor Nzinga Harrison, a physician with specialties in addiction medicine and psychiatry, chief medical officer and co founder of Eleanor Health.
She has spent her career really focusing on stigma reduction and health equity.
Doctor Harrison is super uniquely positioned to help folks navigate the stress of current events, from the opioid crisis and Covid to racial violence and systemic injustice, and begin to move from thinking to action with the goal of truly improving health and society.
And she also happens to host the in Recovery podcast.
Such an eye opening and powerful set of insights.
Here is Doctor Harrison.
The expertise that I've developed that I feel like comes naturally to me now is, like, the not quantifiable part, right?
Like, I tell people all the time, as a psychiatrist, the concept is that as a psychiatrist, you talk, talk, talk, but in reality, you listen, listen, listen, listen.
I'm listening as much for the things that people are not saying as I'm listening for the things that people are saying, I value the voices of my patients equally, if not more than I value my medical expertise.
Like, I recognize to make magic, we need my medical expertise.
I also recognize there is no magic without that other person sharing themselves and their experiences with me.
And I always say, psychiatry is the redheaded stepchild of medicine and addiction medicine is the redheaded stepchild of the redheaded stepchild.
Right?
And so when I found addiction medicine, I was like, biology, psychology, life, relationships, activism, marginalized, denigrated, undervalued people.