Vesper Moore, certified peer specialist
Chief Operating Officer at the Kiva Centers mental health services
Started hearing voices in their head at the age of 12, were diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, rejected their diagnosis, and all psychiatric diagnoses as meaningless and oppressive; recovered; do not take medications, using “wellness practices” instead, such as deep breathing and ceremonies of his indigenous ancestors. In the information they share publicly, they do not mention how long they have been off medication. They were hospitalized on and off for four and a half years; the longest hospitalization lasted a year. A turning point occurred when they joined Recovery Learning Communities. Currently, they are a senior manager at the Kiva Centers, a board member of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and have been on the SAMHSA technical experts panel and among the participants of the UN Economic and Social Council Youth Forum as part of their international human rights advocacy. They advocate for community support and voluntary mental health services that will make involuntary treatment unnecessary; in their work, they respect individual choice, recognizing that “every person will have a different experience with their journey. People may feel psychiatric medications are life-saving and/or life-destroying.” They say that their life mission is “to rewrite the narrative the mental health-industrial complex has enforced on our society by bringing perspectives of psychiatric survivors and mad, labelled mentally ill, neurodivergent, and disabled people to national and international spaces.”
Website: https://www.vespermoore.com/
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