Depth Work: Mind, Body & Society in Mental Health

Hi there, I’m Jazmine Russell

I’m a mental health educator, scholar at the intersection of critical psychology, mad studies, & neuroscience, writer, and trauma-informed breathwork practitioner.

I’ve held many roles within and outside the mental health system working mostly with psychosis survivors, and learned just how much there is to UN-learn about how we approach mental health in research and practice. For the last 10 years I’ve been endlessly curious about the personal and societal conditions that create illness and health, the process of transformation, and how different people across disciplines can work together to reveal the mystery and depth of this loopy and complex relationship we call the mind and body (hopefully, we’ll have better language for it someday).

My Story

My work is based first and foremost on my own lived experiences. I’m a complex trauma survivor of childhood sexual abuse, an experience that among other factors led to a 3 month long psychosis in my early 20s exacerbated by an undiagnosed autoimmune disease. Psychosis wasn’t the problem, it was the warning sign of much deeper psychological and physiological harms to my being.

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