Welcome to the Reality Check podcast. Psychosis is Real, so is Recovery. On this episode, Ashley Weiss and Serena Chaudhry speak with International Mental Health Activist Matthew Jackman.

Matthew identifies as a Mad person and is an International Mental Health Activist. They received Australia's National Mental Health Advocate award from the Mental Health Foundation of Australia in 2020 and is a current Commissioner on Lived Experience in Mental Health Research, in collaboration with Kings College London, Traumascapes, Wellcome Trust and Lancet Psychiatry.

Matthew is the Founder/Principle Consultant of The Australian Centre for Lived Experience (TACFLE), an international peer lead consultancy and advisory practice. They have been a global mental health activist promoting human rights, social justice, and lived experience perspective from public health, critical sociology, and Mad studies disciplines.

Matthew previously represented the Western Pacific Region on the Global Mental Health Peer Network and was a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum. They consult the World Health Organisation on lived experience mental health perspective and peer work practice. Furthermore, they have worked for the United Nations in Disability Inclusion for the Economic and Social Development Asia Pacific Region.

After studying in Australia in undergraduate and postgraduate social work, they trained internationally in certified peer specialist practice at Project Return in Los Angeles. They have been a social work lecturer in mental health and trauma for a decade.

Matthew is an open service user, participant, consumer, and family/carer of various systems. They are passionate about dismantling and reconstructing systems of justice driven care.

Subscribe for more episodes of Reality Check, where we uncover the truth behind mental health, one story at a time.

For more information about Clear Answers to Louisiana Mental Health (CALM) and their Early Intervention Psychosis Program (EPIC NOLA), visit the website: www.calmnola.org

🔴 Podcast produced by Red Rock Branding – www.redrockbranding.com

Welcome to Reality Check. Good afternoon. I'm Serena.

This is Ashley, and we're excited to have Matt Jackman here with us today on Reality Check. Matt is the founder of the Australian Center for Lived Experience and an international peer run, consultant practice. they've been the global health

activists promoting human rights, social justice, and lived experience perspective from a public health and a mad studies discipline, which we're going to talk to you more about. Why don't you start by telling us more about you and how you came to be working in this subject matter of mad science.

Yeah, so I I'm Matt. I'm a

person with lived experience of madness or distressing madness. As for me, madness isn't always distressing. What that might be categorized as illness or disorder. But yeah, I grew up in I grew up with a mother who had a lot of mental health issues and a lot experienced a lot of distress as a result of intergenerational trauma and a grandmother that really had no choice in having children and unfortunately imparted a lot of that, I think, frustration and resistance.

Resentment onto her. So that along with marrying my father and her parents disapproving of that marriage, was left as a young woman, sort of socially abandoned, in a domestically abusive relationship, and living in poverty, which was not her upbringing. And having three young children by the time she was 24. So a lot of a lot of social and structural issues really surrounded the context.

for her distress and madness and had a lot of postpartum issues with my younger brother. I'm the eldest of three.

And unfortunately that it it just did it got worse for her and we were put in foster care for a period of time. and yeah, she had suicided during that that time that I was in foster care. so my last memories of her are in a a psychiatric unit around the time of sort of formal deinstitutionalization in the late 90s. so there wasn't a great deal amount of community support either at that time. and then I continued.

I continued to grow up in a fairly abusive home and a lot of my survival and trauma and grief responses began to be pathologized.

And I was also dealing with my sexuality on top of that in a largely religious and homophobic neighborhood that was very multicultural. so yeah, there were I guess accumulation of personal and carer issues as well as growing up in a fairly unstable upbringing that yeah led me to my own, you know, distress and and madness that then was sort of pathologized by the system.

Okay.

system. so yeah, that's a bit of a snapshot of I guess my yeah, my upbringing and and I guess how I perceived and understood a lot of my experiences that were labelled as various mental health diagnoses from more of a a social, cultural and political lens.

Thank you for sharing that. And you've spoken widely on this and I've watched some of your videos and testimony. And they're very compelling. And we'll include some of those in the links below this for others to watch and to hear you share more details or different details in those interviews. Can you tell our listeners and watchers a little bit about the Australian Center for Lived Experience?

Yeah, so the Australian Center for Lived Experience or tacfle was originally conceived as I felt like

There was little community around the MAD movements. And the MAD movements are plural movements that are really led and driven by people with lived experience, where the term MAD, much like queer, has been reclaimed from its historical pejorative use.

Of course, not everyone identifies with that term. And in our communities, there's a lot of difference and dissidence around what terminology we use to identify with, whether it's with the system.

Such as consumer, service user, patient, or identities outside of the system, whether that's psychosocial disability, psychiatric survivor or mad. there's yeah, a lot of plural and plural identities that people identify with. But I felt like there was a lack of physical community and even virtual community in the MAD movements, bringing activists together that were trying to work towards better mental health care both in systems, within systems, but also out

outside of systems and what more humane and just worlds look like that often create and and embed the conditions of distress. So yeah, I really started that with a a few other friends who were also identified as mad people.

And have slowly built that up to be a both a consultancy but also coaching and supervision for lived experience advocates and people that are working within peer roles within the system, as well as enabling a lot of systems advocacy and collaborations with universities and global mental health advocacy bodies. So, yeah, I've been fortunate to attend a lot of high-level spaces with the UN and the World Health Organization.

in influencing human rights and social justice oriented policy around mental health. and also opening up the explanatory frameworks beyond the predominant biomedical one to the more of a social, cultural, spiritual and political framework.

for how we both conceptualize distress and distressing madness but also how we respond and care and heal for distress and distressing madness. So yeah, I use those terms instead of mental illness as they they sit a bit more comfortably with me and my experiences. Yeah.

That's amazing.

I guess how would, you know, if you were to offer like mini consulting right now, but how would you help, what would be your approach to sort of helping someone that's initially having these experiences that are being labeled by people around them, misunderstood by people around them and so on with how they then intersect with

with the mental health system and wherever they actually live. Like it's so much different. It's even different in the United States within, like I'm a child adolescent psychiatrist, even with like child psychiatry as approach, like how people are approached versus people that are primarily seeing adults. But I guess within systems, there's such a difference in approach and then like,

between different countries and so in your work with people all over the world, what is sort of your like I guess all encompassing strategy or best way to sort of have someone feel that they can have like a healthy intersection with these systems and then with them with like themselves and what they're dealing with, their distress.

That was a long question. I hope it made sense.

Yeah.

It's a it's a really good question or multiple questions that have I think a lot of layers because i particularly in the global mental health like discourse in that in that field and area, you know, there's a lot of talk around kind of universalising, you know, Western exportation of medicine and psychiatry to the global south, the global majority. and I think we're at a point of acknowledging and also not romanticising local and indigenous wisdom and practices as well that might be harmful.

Mm-hmm.

So for me, I guess firstly it's about people having the option and the knowledges of understanding their experiences that are not just primarily the psychiatric paradigm that are beyond that. And maybe that is from you know more local indigenous cultural understandings of distress and distressing madness, but also just healing practices, you know, which are often you know peer-led and mutual aid driven and family orientated, sometimes spiritual, sometimes religious.

you

I think there's you know, part A is about people having the option and being aware of the different

Yeah, knowledge frameworks for understanding their experiences beyond any one particular framework. and then and then part B of that is people should also have the choice, autonomy and awareness of what sort of practices, healing practices or interventions they think will work best for them. So I'm always very led and driven by people having the solutions from within themselves, whether that's a person, a family, a community, and being led by people's wisdom.

so that that's sort of how I would go about that and negotiate that but at the end of the day for me like the mad movements are really around people's self-determination their choice their agency or autonomy so but but as humans we don't also always have all the knowledge and access to knowledge and awareness of what exists so it's important to have those dialogues and discussions too you know

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, I love the idea of shared imparting of wisdom, from the individual perspective and the humanism side and with people from all of the different layers of your own community as part of the, as kind of the general ultimate solution that could be applied no matter where you are.

Yeah, and I think about my own like journey and story and for me I have a very strong understanding of my own distress and and or madness as a response to bullying in the workplace, in response to childhood abuse and trauma, in response to complex grief and and dealing with the suicide, but also loss of, you know, grandparents and and siblings to, you know, the mental health system. and as you say, like in adult, you know, adult psychiatry, adult mental health spaces.

Yeah.

There just seems to be a lot less hope and a more negative view of people's recovery as opposed to like the child adolescent space. So yeah, it's important to like listen to people's stories and and get a sense of yeah, how they understand the evolution of their experiences. Because we don't we don't have any one answer to madness as a philosophy, as a concept, as a reality. so there's some level of intellectual humility to just trust

trust people's own wisdom and their own frameworks for how they understand their experiences and how they think they can be best supported through their experiences.

Do you think that as we are changing the way we approach madness and we support people in different ways, that the ability for we will be able to better hold out hope for the adults for whom there hasn't been hope in the past?

yeah, I do think so. I think the system, I mean, we have to acknowledge the system is still predominantly a psychiatric paradigm. So there's still a very strong, I think a strong biomedical lens of understanding distress and distressing madness through an illness, disorder and disease paradigm. Which I think can be quite harmful when that's the the predominant paradigm, as I I feel like that narrative does perpetuate a lack of hope and a sense of it's either curable or incurable.

which as we know is just not not the truth. As people with any any diagnoses, yeah, as we've seen with research over time, you know, we know that people can can recover and live meaningful lives irrespective of whatever diagnosis they've received or experience of madness they live with. so yeah, I do I do have hope. I mean, I started my career in a forensic hospital at the pointy end, working with people that were found not guilty by reasons of mental impairment of a a particular

crime. so I've worked at the pointy end of you know, where harm and madness may intersect. and and even in those spaces we absolutely carry yeah a lot of hope and understand the consequences and context for how people, you know, often ended up in situations where madness and harm did intersect. So whether that be trauma or disconnection or poverty or viol you know, violence and harm in in the in people's own lives.

Thank

You

Yeah, I think that there is hope and I'm hopeful that like having a a more understanding framework for madness, a more compassionate and humane framework, it will hopefully imbue people having a sense of understanding that recovery is you know possible for anyone.

we're all I mean, we're here doing this work because we're hopeful and right, having this podcast because we live in that space where we believe that changing the course of how we approach this, elevating the lived experience and engaging individuals and in shared decision making is the way towards making change and providing better care. To your point, the systems that exist are not always supportive and can be

destructive and oppressive in some moments. But I think part of the systemic challenges is stigma is part of the systemic challenge. And in our work with Calm, Clear Answers to Louisiana Louisiana, the mental health, our work is to reduce stigma. And I'm curious in your work around the world and locally, where are you seeing or how are you seeing stigma show up, both big and small?

Yeah, well I think i again it leads on from my last point that I actually think sometimes a predominant psychiatric paradigm can be quite stigmatizing in the sense that people have this idea that yeah mental illness is somehow solely, you know, genetic or within the person or it's you know nature rather than nurture. I think that there's obviously stigma around, you know, suicide and the criminalization of suicide around the world that's still very pervasive, along with other

intersections of you know, homosexuality and and and and being, you know, transgender still

intersecting with a lot of stigma in that in that context. But all the all the research and advocacy around stigma at the moment is around social contact and you know if people have you know have access to someone usually a a meaningful relationship of some sort or or positive experiences in the media with people that have been you know branded with these labels and as we know some diagnoses are more stigmatizing than others that if people have positive contact

and really get to see people as as humans, as other compassionate, empathic humans, that that is a primary driver for changing the sorts of attitudes and beliefs people have around folks, you know, living with diagnoses such as schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar, where a lot of the the stigma and underlying beliefs around madness are are that you know we should fear, you know, people socialize to fear people with those diagnoses, or socialize that the people living with those diagnoses are unpredictable or un

unreliable. There's a lot of those public narratives that we see perpetuated in the media and through film and TV. So a lot of the reversal and unlearning of that is having contact with people with those diagnoses that challenge those, you know, attitudes, values and beliefs that we've been socialized into.

Yeah, I actually work in the forensic hospital as well. I just came from there this morning. And when you think about, I think it feels overwhelming for people on all sides to think of the vastness of the issues, which brings itself a lot of hopelessness when you feel like.

I'm just interacting with one person. Like how am I ever, how is there ever going to be change in sort of like just day-to-day practice? But like this morning at the hospital, there was a new nurse, her first day. And this is at, this is, know, most of my patients have an NGRI issue. And I was the first psychiatrist she had ever met in her nursing school and her pathway.

And I was shocked, but then I was like, okay, Ashley, don't be upset. I was like, oh, this is going to be a good opportunity for her. I'm going to be the first psychiatrist to hopefully set a tone for this person and her new career. and, and really realizing the impact that those moments have and can potentially have and have to happen over time to.

Not that I practice without major mistakes, but I can, believing and believing in people's stories and hearing them and giving them space no matter what the setting to be. I mean, today, my patient this morning, we talked about K. Jameson's book. We had four books that we were going through. It's all of these beautiful metaphors of his experience.

And I was so happy that like the new dietician and the new nurse could like be with him expressing himself. And it's like all those moments layered on. Maybe, maybe, you know, there are some hopeful things in the mix of a very hopeless atmosphere. mean, it's a, so it's like a responsibility is what I'm.

trying to stay on both ends, on all ends of making sure that you're living, know, whatever your experience is in a way that's inclusive of how you're relating with the people around you and from all of these different walks of life.

Yeah, it like a really nice moment to have new energy actually in the room made me feel very hopeful.

Yeah, it can be, you know, there can be a lot of you know, moral injury and and trauma for, you know, practitioners within the system that feel feel also oppressed and constrained by by the limitations of at the end of the day, what is a carceral it's a carceral system, even not just in forensics, but in any any institutional environment it ha is based on prison logic. and that that obviously is not set up for a care and healing environment, but but

All

Yeah.

It feels like that in the intensive

care unit, quite frankly.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Well well yeah, people in the mad movements initially when they started collectively organizing would would

categorize themselves with the labels of ex-patient or ex-inmate because it was it it mirrored incarceration. This is in the early 70s around deinstitutionalization, but I think it's still very alive and real. And and yeah, people are people and and are trying to do the best that they can. And I think you make a good point around like the training as well of of various disciplines and workforces and yeah how limiting they can be in terms of exposure to yeah even just other knowledge bases

Whether that's you know sociology knowledge or whether that's occupational knowledge. I mean, we can't know everything, but it is important to have, I think, better allied health, you know, training for all practitioners. and and now obviously there's a stronger peer workforces and lived experience workforces that come with their own theories and knowledges and practices and values. So yeah, something more multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, I think, is important in future practices.

practice as yeah, you know, having more a knowledge and awareness of other multiple paradigms I think is doesn't I I don't think is harmful unless it's not aligned with people's self determination, choice and agency, you know.

Yeah. Well, one way that we're trying to provoke hope and to work across systems and across disciplines and across different groups of humans is through the creative arts and expression. And we have multiple components of our work, both at the clinic and within our early psychosis campaign

Storytelling, creative expression, all of that has been effective on our end. I'm curious to what extent you've seen that out in the world when you're doing this work and what role you believe it plays in terms of advocacy and education.

Yeah, I think any anything creative or artistic i as you say is is about expression. I mean it's deeply human and people express their their mind, body, spirits in in many different ways through many mediums. So I I think it's central to have space both in terms of time and resource for people to be able to express themselves. and often distress or distressing madness, you know, folks don't maybe have a a verbal or vocabulary

expression for that, you know, in writing or in speaking form. So, you know, again, the arts or other creative mediums are an outlet for people to be able to, you know, channel what they're going through. and again, it might not be aligned with a psychiatric paradigm or framework. It might be something very spiritual or something very ancestral or so yeah, I I you know it's been art art and the creative expression mediums have been very central to my own recovery.

In terms of stand-up comedy and theatre, and other visual frameworks and and certainly around the world, I think I don't know whether it's a correlation, but many mad folks really thrive in the the art scene and and really art both in terms of visual art and performance art is seen as a a cultural production in the mad movements. So mad pride as a sub movement of the mad movements is all about

also valuing like the cultural production that we've yeah that we've been able to produce in society as mad people. so yeah I think that the it has a very strong place. but often again is relegated in that hierarchy of knowledge. You know, the art the arts is sort of seen at the bottom of the pile with lived experience and often you know bureaucracy, medicine, law, like there's often quite a like a hierarchy of knowledge, you know, within the psychiatric system. So I I hope

that we can work towards you know plural ways of valuing different knowledges within the system and then funding them in those ways as well so that people again have those options to say I think that I'm maybe medication isn't working so well in this sec you know in this part of my life but you know maybe writing or maybe I don't know you know other art mediums might work better for someone going through something so yeah it's complicated but it it it's very central I think in

you

in many many folks' lives.

Yeah. I think complicated and not. you helped me to think of two examples recently that I think speak to the inclusion of and elevating of the importance of arts. One, Ashley and I were at the APA conference last year or the year before, and there was an offshoot at the conference of lived experience and it was a comedy show, musical performances, all of this. It was

amazing and super inspiring. And so like shout out to APA for having that be a part of it. I think that was very important and inspiring. And then at the clinic a couple of weeks ago or the during the month of May, I think it was,

we have a medical student who is a ceramicist and she offered to come into the clinic for a month and do ceramics with our patients. And so I got to sit in on one of those groups and it was amazing because it wasn't like we were there

I mean, maybe some people were there with the intention of creating something awesome, but we were really just all sitting there with some clay and we were working with our hands and creating things, creating from within. But it was the conversation also that came from us all sitting at the table, the conversation about people's hospitalizations, about their experience with the system and how they're challenging the system, how they're helping themselves. It was the the art, the creativity created a cathartic space for all those who were at the table.

Yes, yeah. I know I remember even my my first hospitalization over a decade ago. I you know, the two most important people probably in that sort of two-month period that I was in hospital was the the student. We did there was no paid art therapist, of course, but she was a student art therapist and and the pastoral care, the spiritual care worker who worked across the general hospital and and psychiatric unit. So again, they just came with a different lens and one that felt very deeply human and compassionate

compassionate

and yeah there's something about yeah I don't know whether it's also just the tactile nature of working through things and thoughts and emotions whilst also processing with your hands and not having to directly speak or confront you know quite serious topics that allow for expression but yeah I totally like echo those experiences that are really yeah profound and and and healing and cathartic.

And that came out of, I mean, from her perspective was a conversation because I can't remember how she found out I used to be a ballerina, but she was like, how did you like know when you had to stop or if like medical school was too much and you stopped dancing because she was struggling with, she had her masters in fine arts and she was a ceramicist and like.

needing to have those parts of her life to be a better doctor. And I was like, come, do whatever you want. And she was just like, really? I'm like, yes, like this is like you like for you to be healthy and learn and like feel all of the cool things about you that make you you like you need to have an outlet to do those things. So it was just this mutually beneficial thing from so many.

like from so many different lenses. And with all of our medical students, because we do have a school of medicine, we have a lot of people in and out in various ways.

I just really encouraging them to find, to keep, not keep, but to acknowledge those parts of themselves that sometimes get like, you know, become less of a priority when the stakes become high in other kinds of ways.

Yeah. Well it's interesting, even like mad studies as a as a discipline, you know, that looks at the sort of history, philosophy and politics of mad people and mad people's movements. The you know, the very strong lived experience-led knowledges around paradigms for understanding distress and and madness are often, you know, about the embodied forms of knowledge that we have in distress and madness, or the relational, you know, the relational forms of knowledge that we have within us. and also the expressive and creative.

forms along with the sort of social cultural structural political so I think from a an individual perspective like within within like lived experience movements yeah the embodied creative and relational are often centered so it's interesting that we're having this chat around what that actually looks like in practice and yeah wouldn't that be amazing if a psychiatrist brought their artistic you know trainings or interests and hobbies into their you know practices and had the time and and energy

and capacity to do that sort of relational work with people, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah,

I've tried to get some of my patients to let me teach them Pilates and they say, they say, yes. No, thank you, Dr. Weiss. See you next time. I know. Not happening, but thanks for offering. Thanks for the offer.

Yeah, also fair enough. I'd probably say the same thing. I'm very inflexible. So I'd say thanks for no thanks.

Yeah. But it's a very human, you know, again it's about humanizing. I think a lot of the psychiatric

paradigm takes the like the humanness out of, you know, who we all are, both as as practitioners, as service users or survivors in systems. and yeah, rehumanizing us with, you know, what our interests and hobbies and skill sets are outside of this mental health industrial complex is really important, you know, in terms of relationship building.

for sure, for sure. And so I want to, as we move towards closing, I just want to bring it back to the individual and the listeners who are out there today who maybe are experiencing symptoms, maybe fear they're experiencing symptoms. W what advice would you have for them around their voice? T sharing with them or helping them to understand why their voice matters in this

work that we're doing.

Yeah, I I think, you know, voice, as I mentioned, self determination, agency, choice, empowerment are all, you know, central pillars of the mad movements or lived experience movements. And I think being able to to find your voice and feel empowered to exercise your voice and agency, whether that be, you know, with friends and family or with with treaters or services, yeah, is really important. And I think I think by

by getting to a point of feeling empowered, it's important to be able to have the knowledge and access to resources to to know what your rights are, to know the different explanatory frameworks of your experiences. yeah, people might use the term symptoms, they might use other terms. but I think it's it's really around yeah, finding access to communities that have had similar experiences. So I I live with, you know, manic depression. I feel like that's a more more accurate

term for my experiences than the term bipolar. but I've certainly sought out other folks that say in the hearing voices movements or other folks in Mad Pride where often mania is viewed as like a spiritual gift in our communities as well. So it's a very different framework to like a pathology framework of mania.

and and trying to find and tether, yeah, tether the experiences that you know, maybe don't become destructive. Or how do you harness the gifts and creativities and strengths that come out of experiences of distress and madness without it becoming destructive, you know, and I think

I don't think they're often conversations I've had with psychiatrists myself, but often us as peers have in our communities around, you know, this hasn't all been a bad thing. How do I sort of harness those gifts? So I think it's really about finding community and and having options and talking to different people and finding the right providers that are on your page with your, you know, a I guess a similar ideology or similar framework. So my psychiatrist is great. She's she's also a child and adolescent psychiatrist and comes from a

Mm-hmm.

Trauma background and is very political and really quirky like myself. So you know, I I I really needed someone that had a very strong political determinant perspective, which sometimes is a bit an antithesis to a psychiatric paradigm. but that's what works for me, you know, and we've been able to find a really happy medium where she just jokes to me and says, yeah, it's all capitalism, isn't it, Matt? and you know, but I I need I need that in my in my

Yeah.

And you know, we obviously can have chats about, you know, sleep and medication and, you know, managing my mood. but yeah, having someone that's on the same page of my frameworks is really important. And I think we can only do that by knowing what's out there and and accessing our peer support systems and speaking to family and other people that have been through it.

Thank

I really appreciate several of the points there because I think you bring up something that we maybe don't talk about enough about voice within treatment we talk about, but asking questions, requesting things, you know, reframing things for oneself so that th one can feel empowered in the context of right, the system that can often feel is working against them.

And you bring up rapport and we talk about this all the time at our clinic. And it's all about rapport and it's about finding that other human in the world who write and support you and and respect you for who you are in the context of like this moment in your journey. Ashley, any final question before we wrap up?

Good fit.

Yeah.

When are you coming to New Orleans? We need to have you come visit.

Well, you know, it's

You know,

it's very funny. My my my oldest half sister who I'm closest with lives in Austin with my, you know, brother in law and kids. So I was supposed to be going down to New Orleans at some point when I was visiting them. So it'll probably be next year at this point, given, you know, the the political climate and situation at the moment. I was actually supposed to be at Yale instead of Canada, but because of the shutdowns and delays with visa interviews and and just yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it just wasn't the right time. So hopefully hopefully the US will be a a b a better time to come next year.

I know.

we share the same sentiment.

Yes, yes.

We

live in a maddening world at the moment. So how how we make sense of that and respond to that is is also an important part of all the of this discussion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of my, one of my, I can't say I have favorites, but my favorite patients is like, why do I have to come and talk to you when there's people with active delusions, like operating major countries, like at any given moment. I was like, truce. mean, I have no idea. Like, how are we, how are we going to manage this together? Because it is like it's a, it's a point of deep connection right now.

Mm-hmm.

in this country and probably elsewhere too of how to get through this. I won't talk about that anymore. But when you do come to New Orleans or come to the South, we'd love to have you at the clinic where Serena and I are party people and really just want to have like good times with all of the people that we can surround ourselves in our orbit.

Mm-hmm.

with so it was lovely talking to you and meeting you.

Yes.

Yeah, well I'm interested in sort of building some bridges with

You know, all people that are within the right value set and mind mindset. You know, I think historically psychiatrists have been sort of demonized in the mad movements. And, you know, there's obviously a very littered history of of problems. but I think there's also we need to be thinking about people that are on the same page and and how we how we can find people that are our allies. 'Cause even in lived experience spaces there are a lot of people with horrible politics that are not aligned with mad movements.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

values. So

Yeah.

I'm also very interested in hearing from psychiatrists about what a more compassionate, humane, you know, system or maybe not system, what a world looks like where where people that live with with distress and madness are are supported, cared, loved, healed. you know, I think that we're all yearning for that as people in the mental health system. So I'm I'm glad that we can, yeah, start this dialogue and look look forward to yeah, coming along and and hanging out in person sometime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. It's an open invitation down to New Orleans. Well, thank you for your time, Matt. We really enjoyed speaking with you.

Amazing. Thank you.