The mental health advocacy community has lost a quiet giant. Brian Lindstrom was a Portland, Oregon-based documentary filmmaker who devoted his career to telling the stories of people living with mental illnesses and the consequences of a judicial system that too often criminalizes them. He described his subjects as people ‘society puts an X through’…
Miami-Dade didn’t just join the movement to treat mental illness as health problems instead of crimes. It started it. Back in 1989, Miami-Dade opened the first drug court in the nation, betting on the idea that people struggling with substance use deserve treatment and accountability instead of a jail cell. That model has since spread…
Consider this your official notification: You’ve Been Book’d! Mental Health Awareness Month is always an incredibly important time of year for the work Flawless Foundation and so many other organizations do, but this month felt especially grounded in action, education, and collective healing! We’ve compiled all of our top recommendations from the month into this…
Here’s What the Data Says… Mental health policy debates often focus on access and affordability. Those gaps are real, but they sit on top of something deeper: a system that has never treated brain health as a legitimate medical priority, and that has consistently failed the people most in need of it. Five fault lines…
You’re scrolling your phone. Your chest is tight, your jaw is clenched, and you can’t quite name why. Maybe something happened earlier. A tense conversation, a deadline, a piece of news that landed wrong. Or maybe nothing happened at all, and that’s the hardest part to explain. What you’re feeling has a name: nervous system…
There is an idea at the center of Internal Family Systems therapy that, the first time you hear it, feels almost too gentle to be true. There are no bad parts of you. Not the anxious one. Not the angry one. Not the one that shuts down when life gets heavy. Each of those inner…
Mental Health, the Justice System, and the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery Judge Steve Leifman is a retired Miami-Dade County court judge who continues his advocacy work through the Leifman Group. He sat down with us to talk about what brought him to this work, what Miami has built over the last twenty-five…
Inside Our Somatic Movement and Chair Yoga Workshop at NAMI Special thanks to Jennifer Baez, our Wellness Facilitator, for sharing her experiences and reflections from the workshop. We’ve gathered her insights here to share them with our wider community. When the Flawless team arrived at NAMI Palm Beach County for our wellness workshop, the room…
A #FlawlessTalk on Maternal Mental Health Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week is a time to celebrate the beauty of new life, but it is also an opportunity to speak about the realities many new moms face. The transition to parenthood can be one of the loneliest and most overwhelming seasons of life. Recently, we sat…
Today, we celebrate our dear friend and collaborator, Bernadette Pleasant. A grief educator, somatic healer, and creator of Femme!, Bernadette has spent her career building a practice in which movement and honesty do the work that words alone cannot. Certified in the Nia Technique, Nia 5 Stages, Ageless Grace, Somatic Healing, Reiki, and Integrated Energy…