Caroline Mazel Carlton (she/her)

Caroline Mazel-Carlton has laid her head in a number of places, from Indiana jail cells to Texas psychiatric units, but now enjoys a freer existence as Director of Training for the Wildflower Alliance and the Hearing Voices Research and Development Project. Since moving out of a staffed psychiatric residential facility in 2009, Caroline has worked tirelessly to create change in the mental health system and has developed and re-defined peer roles in a number of settings across the globe from North Carolina to Western Australia.

Caroline’s passion is centering and exploring the experiences that are often the most silenced, such as suicide, trauma and non-consensus reality states. Her work with “Alternatives to Suicide” and the Hearing Voices Network has been featured in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Foreign Policy and O magazine. Caroline has contributed to multiple academic publications on the topic of suicide and one book on her experience skating on a roller derby team as #18 “Mazel Tov Cocktail”. Caroline is also passionate about re-claiming cultural and spiritual wisdom traditions for navigating extreme states and is now preparing to become a rabbi as a Kesher fellow in the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Sean Donovan (he/him)

Sean is a trainer for Alternatives to Suicide, When Conversation Turns to Suicide, and Intentional Peer Support trainings, and has presented at national conferences about these things and more. He brings his experiences as a queer man surviving suicidal thoughts and psychiatric hospitalization to his work as an advocate in these settings. Sean facilitates weekly Alternatives to Suicide and LGBTQIA+ support groups. He also coordinates Career Initiatives — small business and creative project — grants for folks with great ideas but fewer resources, and helps develop written and film advocacy resources.

Sean is passionate about preserving queer history and making it more accessible. He serves on the board of the Sexual Minorities Archives, where he also started a podcast, Out of the Archives. While due to despair or fatigue he doesn’t leave bed everyday, he does also find time to make music with folks which he’s loved doing for most his life — these days he plays in a band with two powerful women called Feminine Aggression.

Ebony Flint (she/her)

Ebony Flint grew up in the projects in Boston. She identifies as a trauma survivor; having overcome the struggles of a life with continuous sexual and emotional abuse from a very young age. She spends much of her time teaching strategies to help others navigate and address emotional and/or mental distress and other challenges. She is very passionate about this work, as a parent of a child with special needs and a person who has overcome traumatic experiences alone. Ebony is a Certified Peer Specialist, a Peer Group Facilitator for Alternatives to Suicide and Hearing Voices Network, and a Wellness Recovery Action Plan Facilitator for adults, young adults, and trauma survivors. She has experience working with people both within the community and in hospital settings. 

Ebony has a teenage daughter and resides in the Central Mass area. She loves laughing, learning new things, watching UFC, and sarcastic t-shirts!

Rafael Rodriguez (he/him)

Rafael comes from a place of having learned through living. He himself has been homeless, struggled with problems with substances, and suicidal thoughts, among other life experiences that he has not only survived but learned from. Rafael is also a father, a chef, and loves football. He is also bilingual (English/Spanish) and available to offer supports in both languages.

Sera Davidow (she/her)

Sera Davidow resides in Western Massachusetts where she has been a part of the Wildflower Alliance (home to the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community) since its visioning process, serving as Director since it became funded in 2007.  There, she has gained over a decade of experience in project development and oversight, grant writing, public speaking, curriculum development, training, supervision, and leadership among so many other things. She also worked as a lead trainer for the state’s Certified Peer Specialist program for nearly ten years, is a founding member of the Hearing Voices USA Board of Directors, and publishes articles regularly on Mad in America. (Additionally, Sera is well versed in the ins and outs of being a Mystery Shopper but that’s a job for a different story!)

Sera received her first psychiatric diagnosis as a teenager, accumulating a handful more by her early twenties.  That, along with a lengthy history of self-injury and emotional distress, led to her first experience being held against her will in a psychiatric facility  at the age of 22, and an array of prescriptions for psychotropic drugs.  However, it was her ‘non-compliant’ and rebellious nature that paved her way down another path and to a full life where she re-defined herself as a survivor and has found success without any diagnoses or psychiatric drugs for over a decade.

Her employment journey first brought her to a position in the conventional mental health system, but she soon found her way to peer-to-peer support communities, advocacy and social justice efforts. Through this work, she has gained a range of experiences including starting up a peer respite (Afiya), opening community centers, and producing educational materials (including co-authoring handbooks on peer respites and developing peer roles, as well as co-authoring two book chapters on suicide).  She has also developed a passion for filmmaking, beginning with ‘Beyond the Medical Model’ in 2013. 

More is available about Sera, her story, and her work in this 2017 article from Sun Magazine: An Open Mind – Sera Davidow Questions What We Think We Know About Mental Illness

Sera speaks on a wide range of topics including (but not limited to):

• Trauma
• Suicide
• Self-injury
• Language
• Challenges within the system
• Unpacking power differentials
• Starting a peer respite
• Developing peer roles

Samples of Sera’s writing are available below:

Mad in America

Foundation for Excellence

Cindy Marty Hadge (she/her)

Cindy Marty Hadge is a person who experienced physical, emotional, sexual and medical trauma as a child. She experienced voice vision and thoughts of ending her life growing up as well. As a young adult she turned to alcohol and street drugs in an effort to make life livable. Over time she entered the mental health system, where the street drugs were replaced with prescribed drugs and the result was frequently the same – walking or stumbling through life in a mind numbing state and while continuing to experience voices, visions and thoughts of ending her life.

Knowing that peer support in the form of 12 Step programs had been helpful in her struggling with substance use, she sought out peer support for her emotional distress and experience of extreme states. Cindy discovered that she lived within walking distance of one of the WMRLC community spaces, where one of the very few HVN groups in the US was held. Within the WMRLC community she found healing and hope. By attending HVN groups she discovered that there were things she could do beyond taking medication to navigate her experience.

Currently Cindy has found the meaning, purpose and connection that she longed for and has made a way of making sense of the senseless and is transforming her tragedies into treasures by being healed when creating space for others to heal. Cindy is gender non conforming and has presented both as Cindy and Marty. Cindy is a keynote speaker and a national trainer.

Martha Barbone (she/her)

Martha spent 15 years in mental health treatment including many hospitalizations, medications and other therapeutic interventions, before discovering peer support. This led to newfound hope and discovery of inner strength. She has worked providing peer support and training in clinical and peer-run organizations and uses her voice to advocate for systems change. Martha is a member of the Alternatives to Suicide training team.

Natan Cohen (they/them)

Natan is a trans and autistic team member who grew up here in Western Mass. Natan is someone who has experienced bullying, addiction, emotional and spiritual abuse, homelessness, chronic illness, and many extreme and unusual states. They have sought answers everywhere from western medicine to the far reaches of alternative healing and spiritual communities, only to find well-being and belonging in peer support. Natan is a lover of compassionate truth-telling, comedy, science, and sharing the potential of peer support. As a former drug dealer, Natan’s work has included a focus on holding space for people who are currently and formerly incarcerated. Natan spends much of their time leading trainings, offering support on our Discord server, and our website website.

In their free time Natan is passionate about cats, parenting disabled children, video games, fantasy and science-fiction, and spending time near moving water.

Calvin Moen (he/him)

Calvin has been developing curriculum and facilitating trainings in Vermont, Massachusetts, and nationally for the past decade, including Intentional Peer Support and A Harm Reduction Approach to Psych Drugs, and presenting and writing on topics like alternatives to policing, and intersections of queer and mad struggles. For him, being an educator is about co-creating learning spaces and sharing resources, not replicating the dominance of authority he encountered in churches and doctors’ offices.

Calvin survived an upbringing characterized by violence, neglect, poverty, religious repression, sexual abuse, and bullying, only to be told by psychiatrists that his emotional suffering was caused by a chemically imbalanced brain. Medication and hospitalization only deepened his sense of isolation and brokenness. By forming connections with people who had discovered value and meaning in the ways we adapt to our surroundings, Calvin came to understand his pain in the context of social structures and oppressive systems. He learned that he was not alone and that his feelings were not a medical problem, and was able to shed some of the shame he had internalized about being queer and trans. These days he still deeply feels the heaviness of living in an unjust world and does a lot of crying yet cultivates liberation and gives voice to his mouthy inner demons by writing apocalyptic fiction, singing in his band This Could Be It, and performing burlesque as Johnny Cashmere.

Micah Matthias (he/him)

Micah is a white queer and transgender trauma survivor who grew up as a fundamentalist Christian in the southeastern US. He’s had experience working in peer support, working with young people in and outside of the traditional mental health system, and doing LGBTQ+ community organizing. Micah spends most of his time trying to figure out how to be a good parent to a young child, wondering about the possibilities of true community in the context of a changing world, facilitating virtual support spaces while sitting next to his 2 cats, and appreciating the beauty and abundance of rural New England.

Tokyo Baldwin (she/her)

Tokyo is a straight, black woman with experience navigating thoughts of suicide, in addition to overcoming racial trauma. Tokyo excels at paving paths where none existed previously and overcoming adversity. She works at Afiya; the first and only peer respite in Western Mass. With an Associates Degree in Criminal Justice, Tokyo strives to make a positive productive difference in the world; for her daughter and her community.

Sam Captain (she/her)

Sam Captain has faced mental health challenges from a very young age.  She grew up in a home where physical and emotional abuse took place regularly, as did neglect.  She lived through trauma after trauma for the better part of 35 years, all the while seeing suicide as her escape hatch and a way to restore some of the overwhelming loss of power and control she experienced.  She has lived through suicide attempts and the subsequent hospitalizations that resulted.  While hospitalized Sam found her community in the other patients, there she met other people who had experienced similar challenges.  These connections to a community of people who understood her would eventually lead her to a more fulfilling life.

Throughout her thirties, Sam also experienced a significant amount of loss, and the grief that has followed each loss has only compounded.  However, she found that grief was an important teacher for her, at each loss she experienced a re-evaluation of her life and priorities, eventually leading her to the path of peer support.  Sam started this journey in the clinical mental health world but now finds herself running a residential program in a peer support agency in Manchester, NH as well as training for Wildflower Alliance.  Training has become a passion of Sam’s, it is a way for her to give the pain she has been through purpose, and it allows her to have an impact on her community.  She trains in the areas of Alternatives to Suicide, When the Conversation Turns to Suicide, Hearing Voices, Intentional Peer Support, and is a Certified Peer Specialist in New Hampshire.

Sam has also been working as a professional photographer for the last 12 years. Doing a documentary on the Anti-Iraq war protest movement is something she is particularly proud of, it started her interest in using her art to call attention to social movements and tell the story of social change. Though most of her professional photography experience is in weddings, she also does portraits and is an enthusiastic landscape artist. She pairs her landscape photography with her love of traveling and she is an avid sunrise chaser.  This love of capturing the natural world has been incredibly healing and grounding.

Jude Grophear (she/her)

Jude Grophear is a creative soul who loves animals, nature, music, video games, writing, films & tv shows, reading, family and friends, and so, so many other things that have kept her invested in living. 

 As someone who learned from a young age that you don’t talk about certain experiences if you value your independence, she found a space of freedom in the nonclinical peer support world where conversations and education around mad liberation and intersectionality with other social justice movements are often held. 

She has now worked in peer support for over a decade, and has presented at local, national, and international conferences. In 2020, she gave a TEDxTalk with a colleague about co-creating an Intentional Peer Support (IPS) based youth peer support pilot program. 

Some of the things that inform her work as a trainer include experiences of voice hearing and multiplicity/plurality, psychiatric oppression, living through significant traumas, and surviving a suicide attempt. She is an Advanced Level WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) Co-Facilitator, an IPS statewide Trainer/Facilitator, a Hearing Voices Network-USA Facilitator, and is now a part of the Wildflower Alliance training team. One of the things she is most proud of is co-creating the first Hearing Voices Network group in NH in 2015, as well as being part of creating the first peer-run Survivors of Suicide Attempts support group in NH.

Jennifer Tirado

Jennifer is a Peer Facilitator and Trainer. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Alternatives to Suicide Network in Connecticut. 

Jennifer identifies as Latina and Neurodivergent. Jennifer had years of feeling a lack of purpose and disconnection. She sought help from the traditional psychiatric model but found it too often led to a dead end. After several stints at the hospital and a list of diagnoses, Jennifer found herself down a winding path of self-discovery. She began her pursuit of finding purpose in her work through taking on a job in Human Services. She found meaning in the opportunity to steady her mind by focusing on someone else. She got involved in Co-counseling.  She discovered the Mad Pride movement and began to see her experiences from other perspectives. She was trained as a certified Recovery Support Specialist at Advocacy Unlimited, in 2016. She is trained in Intentional Peer Support. Jennifer was inspired by the values of Peer Support work and how it related to the idea of the “Wounded Healer” archetype. Jennifer became  involved in advocacy and has experience providing testimony at the state Capitol. She has trained other facilitators in Hearing Voices Network and Alternatives to Suicide approaches. She has also facilitated groups with techniques inspired from Yoga, Music and Writing. 

Jennifer is a writer who uses the experience of mental distress and neurodivergence in her work. 

Her work has appeared in Divergents Magazine.

Jennifer loves New England road trips, playing her ukulele, and spending time with her cats.

Peter Bullimore (he/him)

Peter is a voice hearer who spent ten years as a psychiatric patient enduring many bouts of what gets called “paranoia” and unusual beliefs. Through learning holistic approaches and with support of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) he was able to reclaim his life from the system. He facilitates a hearing voices and paranoia support group in Sheffield. He also runs his own training and consultancy agency, Asylum Associates, and is the founding member of the Paranoia Network. His story was featured in the film, ‘There is a Fault in Reality,’ by Tom Cotton, as well as in one of the foundational HVN texts, Living with Voices: 50 Stories of Recovery. He delivers training on hearing voices and unusual beliefs internationally. He also teaches on the COPE initiative and the Maastricht Interview at Manchester University, as well as offering the Maastricht at Dublin and Cork Universities in Ireland. He co-authored a workbook on childhood trauma called ‘Asking the Questions’ with Paul Hammersley and John Read.

See Peter’s Full Training Menu Here