Seeing Mental Health Through New Eyes:
Integrative, Indigenous, & Community Approaches to caring for our emotional and Spiritual Well-Being!
Resources from the speakers:
Meet the Panelists:
Omid Naim, MD
Dr. Omid Naim is a western trained psychiatrist who came to see the need for more holistic, spiritual, and community-based approaches to health care by seeing the limitations of the conventional model firsthand. He completed General Psychiatry and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry residency at the University of California, San Francisco and went on to work in community psychiatry with high-risk and severely ill youth in the county coming out of foster care. Seeking more holistic and empowering approaches to psychiatric symptom management led him to further studies in Integrative Medicine as a Bravewell Scholar at the University of Arizona, under Dr. Andrew Weil.
In his clinic, Hope Integrative Psychiatry, he designed a multimodal approach for whole person transformation through a trauma informed ecological lens using the power of storytelling. He also founded La Maida Project, a non-profit whose mission is to rewrite the story of mental health and wellbeing. La Maida Project argues that the root cause of mental illness in the western world is a problem with the way we are living and the stories we are telling about human nature and fulfillment.
Miguel Rivera
Born in Guatemala as the son of a Nurse and a Doctor, he spent a lot of time in hospitals and emergency rooms trying to decide if he was going to follow in his parents’ footsteps. Eventually, he began a career in music and postproduction for film and television. He started playing music professionally as a Percussionist in 1973. In 2001, in collaboration with Robert Bly, he translated and published the first English collection of the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal “Poems I brought down from the Mountain.”
Miguel Rivera has been doing healing work for over 40 years and leads multiple ceremonies that include talking circles, vision quests and has participated in over 5,000 sweat lodges. He is a founding member of the Western Gate Roots and Wings Foundation, a member of the Guild of Future Architects and a Board Member for Wolf Connection. He currently works with at risk youth, veterans, and formerly incarcerated individuals with the intention to reduce the level of fragmentation prevalent in the current culture. His purpose in life is to bring healing to people. He has been a board member of “Shade Tree” a mentoring group in Los Angeles since its inception in 1996, introducing at risk youth to traditional Native American ceremonies. He is on the Board of Directors of “Soldier’s Heart,” an organization dedicated to working with Veterans. He has been an Award-winning Supervising Sound Editor for Films and Television since 1984.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. He completed his residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
He works with aboriginal communities to develop uniquely aboriginal styles of healing and health care for use in those communities. He is interested in the relation of healing through dialogue in community and psychosis. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, a trilogy of books on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. His goal is to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing back into mainstream medicine and to transform medicine and psychology through this wisdom coupled with more European-derived narrative traditions. He writes a weekly (almost) blog on health and mental health for www.futurehealth.org. His current interests center around psychosis and its treatment within community and with non-pharmacological means, narrative approaches to chronic pain and its use in primary care, and further developing healing paradigms within a narrative/indigenous framework.
Tobi Fishel, PHD
Moderator
Dr. Fishel is an integrative clinical and health psychologist and the GME Director of Residency Wellness or USC/LAC+USC at the University of Southern California. She is the co-founder of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine (Vanderbilt) and co-developed the Distressed Physician Course at Vanderbilt University which incorporates emotional intelligence, narrative medicine, and mindfulness. She is a consultant to integrative health centers, teaches integrative health to pediatric residents at USC and developed integrative chronic pain nature-based retreats. Dr. Fishel has a unique clinical practice where she incorporates self-compassion, creative arts, mindfulness, movement, depth psychology, spirituality, body-centered practices and the healing medicine of community, music, and the natural world. The guiding principles in her work are authenticity, meaning, and connection and she encourages a deepening relationship with the innate gifts of one’s own soul.