Our Lab
“We offer holistic, person-centered, and peer-based alternatives founded in the synthesis of research evidence, innovative thinking, and community partnership.”
Dr. Shannon Hughes – Director
The Alternatives for Mental Health and Healing Lab aims to forge new pathways for achieving individual and community mental, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being. Our work is designed to challenge status quo paradigms and practices that effectively exclude traditionally marginalized or neglected voices in mental health and healing, such as persons with lived experiences of extreme mental distress.
Our lab develops, delivers, and evaluates trainings on shifting paradigms and practices in mental health, collaborates on the expansion of novel peer-based programming, and investigates emerging uses of psychoactive compounds for genuine healing.
Grand Challenges for Social Work
Our relationships to ourselves, our friends and community, and the environment we inhabit are the most important things we have in life. Increasing disconnection to these things is a major contributing factor to intense mental and emotional distress.
The Alternatives to Mental Health and Healing Lab addresses the Grand Challenges for Social Work of ensuring the healthy development of young people and eradicating social isolation by placing our need for relationships and connection at the center of program planning.