🎧 Dr. Chyrell Bellamy, Director of Yale's Program for Recovery and Community Health
This post is part of the accompanying tips, resources, interviews with experts, and stories of recovery included in the exclusive serialization of Cured: The Memoir.
🎧 Listen to the interview:
Today, I bring you my interview with the amazing Dr. Chyrell Bellamy. Dr. Bellamy is bringing a new narrative to psychiatry, psychiatric treatment, and how we talk about mental health and mental illness. Her philosophy is to bring people with lived experience of mental illness and addiction to the forefront, so those of us who’ve actually experienced mental illness are given a platform as experts in our own right.1
She’s Professor of Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), and Director of Peer Support Services & Research and Director of the Yale Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Academy (LET(s)Lead). She’s also Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of the Commissioner for the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
Her expertise is vast and centers on communities of color and communities of people living with psychiatric illness, substance use and addictions, HIV, homelessness, and incarceration histories. She also focuses on healthcare disparities, sociocultural pathways of recovery from illness and other transformative experiences, and culturally responsive interventions and treatment, which we get into in the interview—among other topics having to do with psychiatric treatment and mental health recovery.
Please enjoy my interview with Dr. Bellamy. As I said, she’s an extraordinary woman and I feel very honored to be able to bring you her research, her wisdom, and her experience.
Enjoy.
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Visit the Table of Contents and Introduction of Cured:
Find more resources for mental health recovery.
Read the prequel to ‘Cured,’ ‘Pathological’ (HarperCollins):
Lived experience refers to anyone with experience of mental illness and addiction.
You put the spark and sprinkle into boring. I think it’s so important to have these conversations about well-being and mental health. Thank you both this was so helpful to listen to. Life doesn’t have to be 50 mph all the time.