Speakers

Announced speakers

Caroline Mazel-Carlton

Caroline Mazel-Carlton is a neurodivergent person and a survivor of institutional trauma in both the psychiatric and criminal legal systems. She now works to promote harm reduction, hope and human rights as the Director of Learning Opportunities for the Wildflower Alliance and as a board member of the Hearing Voices Network USA. Since moving out of a staffed psychiatric residential facility in 2009, Caroline has provided support, advocacy and education in diverse settings from grassroots community spaces to forensic psychiatric hospitals to maximum security prisons.

Caroline’s passion is centering and exploring the experiences that are often the most silenced, such as suicide, insitutional trauma and non-consensus reality states. Her work with “Alternatives to Suicide” and the Hearing Voices Network has been featured in books like Daniel Bergner's "The Mind and the Moon" and 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's own journey also involves the study and practice of Jewish mysticism and folk practices. She works regularly with psychiatric survivors who are reclaiming spiritual tools and frameworks to find healing, community and liberation.

Will Hall

Will Hall, MA, DiplPW, PhD Candidate Maastricht University, is a therapist and community development worker changing the social response to madness. A schizophrenia diagnosis survivor and longtime organizer with the psychiatric survivor movement, he is host of Madness Radio, co-founder of Freedom Center, co-founder of Portland Hearing Voices, co-founder of Hearing Voices Network USA, and past co-coordinator of The Icarus Project.

Will has appeared in several documentary films including Crazywise, Healing Voices, and Coming off Psych Drugs; A Meeting of Minds. Will has a certificate in Open Dialogue and a diploma in Jungian psychology, and his disability advocacy received the Judi Chamberlin Advocacy Award, the Portland Open Minds award, and the Stavros Center for Independent Living Disability Rights Award.

He is the author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs and Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness (finalist for the finalist for the Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize for Nonfiction 2022), as well peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Research Ethics, and chapters in Modern Community Mental Health An Interdisciplinary Approach by Oxford University and The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality. He recently co-created Mad Camp, a summer camp for survivors. www.willhall.net www.madnessradio.net www.outsidementalhealth.com

Trevor Eyles

Trevor Eyles is an Independent Voice-Hearing Consultant, originally from the UK but based in Aarhus, Denmark for the past thirty years. Trained and qualified as a psychiatric nurse in England and as a psychotherapist in Denmark, Trevor has been employed in social psychiatric services for twenty years, concentrating on initiating and developing support for voice-hearers since 2003, as well as educating health-care professionals.



Trevor’s specialised areas of interest include working individually with voice-hearers, setting up and facilitating voice-hearing groups, training professionals to understand and work with the Maastricht Approach to hearing voices, working with the Maastricht Interview and Voice-Dialogue individually and in workshops.

Fritzi Horstman

Fritzi Horstman is the Founder and Executive Director of the Compassion Prison Project (CPP) an organization dedicated to creating trauma-informed prisons and communities and bringing accountability, creative inspiration and hope to all men and women living and working in prisons. With 95% of the incarcerated men and women eventually returning home, Fritzi believes it is imperative that we address the chronic mental health issues in prison with common sense, compassion and urgency. In 2020, Fritzi directed “Step Inside the Circle” at California State Prison – Los Angeles County with 235 incarcerated men. The video has reached over 4 million views worldwide and has attracted over 1200 volunteers to CPP. Fritzi and the team at CPP just finished piloting their 16-part video and workbook curriculum entitled “Trauma Talks” in California, Washington State and other parts of the US and abroad including Columbia, Northern Ireland and New Zealand.

In the fall of 2024, CPP piloted their Correctional Officer Trauma-Informed, partnering with Kirsten Robertson who is a clinician working in the prison system in New Zealand. They hope to pilot at several more prisons in the 2025.

In addition, Fritzi created the CPP podcast “Compassion in Action” interviewing trauma experts and thought leaders including Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Bruce Perry (co-author of “What Happened to You” with Oprah Winfrey), Dick Schwartz, Dr. Daniel Amem, Michael Singer, Byron Katie, Peter Crone, Joe Dispenza and James Doty which is now distributed to over one million incarcerated individuals on the Edovo tablet app.

Fritzi recently directed “Veterans Behind Bars,” a film where the CPP’s Trauma-to-Transformation workshop is delivered to incarcerated veterans bringing them trauma awareness and healing.

Fritzi produced HBO’s “The Defiant Ones” directed by Allen Hughes which has garnered several awards including a Grammy for Best Music Film. Her first feature, “Take A Number,” which she wrote, produced, and directed, debuted at the Slamdance festival and premiered on HBO.Fritzi received a Bachelor of Arts in Film and English from Vassar College.

Dr. Elisabet Lahti

Dr. Elisabet Lahti is an award-winning educator and international speaker specializing in the psychology of inner strength and life force. She is the founder of Sisu Lab, which empowers individuals to cultivate resilience and express strength constructively under pressure.

Her PhD at Aalto University in Finland laid the foundation for research on sisu, the Finnish concept of courage and embodied determination in the face of extreme challenges. Combining applied psychology, systems thinking, and anthropology, Elisabet’s multidisciplinary work explores how we thrive through adversity and evolve as a community amidst struggles. As part of her research, she ran and cycled 2,400 km across New Zealand, using her journey to study the process of overcoming challenges firsthand and engage in social activism for eradicating family violence. She holds a master's in social psychology from the University of Tampere in Finland and master's in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a founding member of the Positive Psychology Association of Finland. 

Elisabet’s book, Gentle Power: A Revolution in How We Think, Lead, and Succeed Using the Finnish Art of Sisu, invites to reimagine power as a force for positive change. Through her talks and workshops, Elisabet shares lessons from over a decade of research and personal transformation as an overcomer of domestic violence and a relentless advocate of life force within all individuals!
You can learn more about sisu at sisulab.com.