Moving Forward: From Mental Illness to Wellness

Meet the Presenters:

Amy Weisman de Mamani is currently a Professor at the University of Miami and a licensed clinical psychologist. She earned her doctorate at The University of Southern California and completed her clinical internship at UCLA. Her research is focused on family and cultural factors that influence the course and outcome of serious mental illness. She has published over 100 manuscripts in areas related to mental illness. In 2021, she published a treatment manual on her Culturally Informed Therapy for Schizophrenia, in the Treatments that Work Series by Oxford University Press. Her research has been funded by NIMH, The John Templeton foundation, APA, and other agencies. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Sue Award for Distinguished Contributions to Diversity in Clinical Psychology by APA’s Division 12 (Clinical Psychology). In 2021, she received the Trailblazer Award from ABCT’s Psychosis and Schizophrenia Spectrum Special Interest Group.

Todd Arkyn Crush spent the first 47 years of his life surviving from one moment, and then into the next. Abused by an adoptive mother, he went into adulthood with a troubled soul and a fractured mind. At 25, he was struck with the onset of schizophrenia. He was so terrified by what was happening, he told no one for 15 years, suffering in deafening and crowded aloneness. He feared he would be locked up forever. His struggles compounded themselves. Unable to navigate life with his young family and society, he witnessed the horrific actions of another schizophrenic and was terrified of his own potential for unpredictable behavior. He disappeared into the wilderness for several years. He returned, struggled for another decade, and agoraphobia took hold. In 2018 he stepped on the scale, and it read 297 pounds. That was the day he began to fight back. From struggling tremendously to even go to the mailbox, to running 100-mile races and speaking to large groups in other states about his journey, Todd has turned the page. Todd’s scars from trauma and mental illness have become maps guiding thousands of others in their own journeys to wellness. From his memoir, From Beneath the Ice, to his forthcoming breakthroughs in the mitigation of mental illness and its ramifications, he seeks to change the way the world speaks about and treats mental illness. Todd is a living example that there truly is no impossible; with determination we become it.

Host or Publisher Samaritan Counseling Services of the Gulf Coast