The Future of Mental Health in America

Laura Delano is a writer, speaker, consultant, and founder of Inner Compass Initiative. Her memoir, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, traces her journey through and beyond the mental health industry.

Through writing, advocacy, and community building, she helps others reclaim their own stories outside diagnosis-driven frameworks, bridging personal narrative and systemic critique.

Cooper Davis is a mental health advocate, speaker, and writer, and the Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative. He works across a diverse coalition of stakeholders—those moving on from the industry and professionals driving change within it.

He holds a BA from Hampshire College and a Master of Science in Organizational Leadership from Quinnipiac University, where he studied how systems change happens.

Awais Aftab, MD is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio, and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. His academic and public-facing work focuses on conceptual and critical issues in the field. He led the interview series “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry” for Psychiatric Times (2019-2022), with a book adaptation published by Oxford University Press (2024). He is a senior editor for the journal Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology. He has been recognized by Lancet Psychiatry as “one of the discipline’s foremost public intellectuals” and is the recipient of the 2026 Distinguished Service Award by the American Psychiatric Association. His bylines include the New York Times, and he writes on his newsletter Psychiatry at the Margins.

Anders Sørensen, PhD, is a Danish clinical psychologist, researcher, and author of Crossing Zero. His work focuses on psychiatric drug withdrawal and tapering, emotion regulation, and trauma-informed psychotherapy. He has published widely on hyperbolic tapering and withdrawal in leading scientific journals and works internationally with clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to improve the understanding and practice of safe deprescribing. He also runs a specialized tapering and psychotherapy clinic in Copenhagen.

elene Speyer is a psychiatrist and researcher, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and consultant psychiatrist at Vestegnsklinikken. She is affiliated with the Copenhagen Research Centre for Mental Health (CORE) at Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, where she leads projects spanning pharmacology, philosophy of psychiatry, and lived-experience methodology. Her work centers on antipsychotic and antidepressant deprescribing, epistemic injustice in mental health care, and complexity and network theory applied to psychiatric outcomes. Current projects include trials of hyperbolic tapering and virtual reality training in shared decision-making. She runs a Substack and edits the philosophy column at Psychiatric Services. She writes in Danish and English across academic, essay, and literary registers, and speaks publicly from a dual position as clinician-researcher and person with lived experience.

David Cohen, PhD, MSW, studies how culture and society shape psychoactive drug policy, psychiatry, and ethical care. He has written more than 130 publications and co-authored Mad Science.

He created award-winning tools like CriticalThinkRx to help professionals and clients make informed choices about psychiatric medications. A former Fulbright Distinguished Chair, he is Professor of Social Welfare and Associate Dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Nico Badre is a board-certified psychiatrist in San Diego providing clinical care, forensic evaluations, and expert testimony, and a forensic psychiatrist with the County of San Diego's Forensic Psychiatry Unit.

He teaches psychopharmacology, ethics in psychiatry, and correctional care across the University of San Diego, Naval Medical Center San Diego, and Family Health Centers of San Diego, and has published more than 60 articles and book chapters.

Kris Kaliebe is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of South Florida in Tampa, board certified in psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

His clinical work has been primarily in university clinics, federally qualified health centers, and juvenile corrections. He writes and presents on the effects of digital technology, psychotherapy, nutrition, mind-body medicine, and mental health in primary care.

Jeffrey Lacasse, PhD, MSW, is Assoc. Professor at Florida State University. His research focuses on problems in knowledge dissemination that pose challenges to the evidence-based utilization of psychiatric medication. He has published papers on direct-to-consumer advertising of antidepressants, the chemical imbalance theory of depression, medical ghostwriting, use of SSRIs after stillbirth, psychiatric treatment in the child welfare system, and the client experience of psychiatric medication.

Sam Fuesy is a behavior scientist, systems strategist, and reform advocate, and the founder of The OBSI Project, a nonprofit working to improve outcomes for children and adolescents across education, child welfare, and juvenile justice.

A Board Certified Behavior Analyst, she works at the intersection of behavioral science and the systems young people are routed through, and speaks on overmedicalization in youth mental health.

Lauren Kennedy West is a social worker, speaker, and creator of Living Well After Schizophrenia, a YouTube channel with over 50 million views and more than 350,000 subscribers. Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2016, Lauren shares openly about serious mental illness, recovery, and the role of metabolic therapies in mental health. Her advocacy is grounded in both hope and honesty: metabolic therapy has profoundly changed her life, while also deepening her commitment to nuance, safety, and responsible public education.

Dr. Javeed Sukhera is a physician, educator, and researcher whose work bridges health care, academia, and community systems. He is internationally recognized for his research on stigma, bias, and health professional wellbeing.

Currently, he serves in senior academic leadership, guiding research and education to improve systems, advance dignity, and expand meaningful choice for patients and learners.

Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson is a licensed clinical psychologist whose research and intervention projects have received scholarly and media attention. She has served as a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry, behavioral sciences, and education at universities and medical schools in the U.S. and abroad.

She has studied psychotropic drug use in children and non-drug alternatives, and is an academic affiliate at the University of South Carolina and a member of SONAR, a national post-marketing drug surveillance initiative.

Mollie Adler is the creator and host of Back From The Borderline, a globally acclaimed podcast that challenges pathologizing narratives and guides listeners through transformation with depth psychology, myth, and lived experience.

Drawing from her own journey, she treats emotional pain as meaningful information, offering an alternative to diagnosis-driven models through story, wisdom, and critique.

Joanna Moncrieff is a professor of critical and social psychiatry at University College London and a consultant psychiatrist in the UK’s National Health Service. She is renowned for developing alternative perspectives on psychiatric drugs and is author of Chemically Imbalanced (Flint Books, 2025).

Her research and clinical practice challenge the idea that psychiatric medications correct chemical imbalances, reshaping how patients and professionals understand these treatments.