What is possible when you get to the root?: The peer-run Wildflower Alliance redefines mental health care, leaves the system in the dust

By Melissa Karen Sances
For the Valley Advocate

Her phone pinged and a grey bubble rose to the surface: “Are you ready to come back?”

The answer was supposed to be yes. She should return and recover. All she had to do was find the right cocktail, her doctor had said, the right mix of medications to manage the voices and the visions that she had experienced since she was 6 years old.

Her first vision appeared like an apparition. After her mother discovered that she was being sexually abused by the upstairs neighbors, she was admonished and told not to go back. But in the middle of the night, she stood frozen on the landing. What she saw was a menacing shadow, a dark entity for her eyes only. She waited for it to move, took one step up – and it lunged at her. It was a wordless warning.

Later there were voices that spoke from different points in time, who all echoed what she had heard as a kid: Don’t tell. Don’t trust. No one sees you. No one wants to.

So now, at the age of 53, with countless hospitalizations behind her and the threat of commitment looming, Cindy Hadge stared at the text. She leaned back in the chair of a restaurant in Lee, 40 miles away from her home in Holyoke. She was in the Berkshires because she was hiding out in the woods. She was in the bar because of the free Wi-Fi. There was a part of her that still yearned for connection, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it.

“I’m trying to figure this out on my own,” she texted back.

The reply was immediate. “Well, maybe if you could do that you would have already done that. And why would we start Afiya except for this?”

Prioritizing agency

Hadge was texting with Sera Davidow, the executive director of the Wildflower Alliance, whom she knew because she’d been to one of the organization’s local support groups. Wildflower is run by people like Hadge who have navigated life-interrupting struggles like psychiatric diagnoses, extreme states of mind and trauma. Davidow has led the organization since 2007, and with a team that now tops 60 people, has made an extraordinary impact on the peer-to-peer community.

Davidow didn’t expect Hadge to recover. She and many others in the Wildflower community don’t even care for the word. “I felt like it tied me to this box of ill,” she explains, “and I didn’t want my whole life defined around what the system said I was. Why is what you call life’s ups and downs what I’m supposed to call recovery?”

But she hoped Hadge would consider a stay at Afiya, the first peer respite in the state and the 13th in the nation, a free alternative to hospitalization run by people with lived experience like hers. There, Hadge could come and go as she pleased, ask for what she needed, and, most importantly, feel a sense of agency over her own healing.

Agency and community are at the heart of all Wildflower has to offer.

Elevating healing

In 2012, Wildflower founded Afiya, later recognized by the World Health Organization as one of four best-practice, human rights-based mental health crisis programs in the world.

“Afiya is a home,” says Director of Respites Ephraim Akiva. “Sometimes someone needs to talk about the really hard stuff they’re going through; sometimes people want to go in their room and journal, or binge-watch a TV show. Whatever they’re looking for can happen here.”

In Hadge’s case, she wasn’t in a communicative space, so she spent hours with a staff member quietly putting together a ping pong table. Others I spoke to marveled at being able to do their laundry and cry openly without being asked to take medication “as a solution to their emotions.” (Wildflower supports everyone’s right to self-determination around medication.)

Located in a house in downtown Northampton, Afiya has three bedrooms that lock from the inside – an important distinction for those familiar with psychiatric hospitalizations, where patients can be confined to a room or bound in restraints against their will. As a result of these practices, as well as a psychiatric provider’s ability to breach patient confidentiality if someone presents a danger to themselves, most people I interviewed experienced significant fear around being honest when they are suffering.

“I’m someone who struggles with chronic or frequent ‘SI,’ as they call it,” says Elyza Leon, a community member referring to the clinical term “suicidal ideation,” or suicidal thoughts. “[At Wildflower] they approach it with such curiosity and compassion, as well as agency and consent.

“After all these years, that was unheard of – a space to talk about it.”

Unconditional support

This April, Wildflower will open the first LGBTQIA+ peer respite in the world, at a time in this country when trans people have been denied their very existence. On President Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order stating that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Less than two years ago, the U.S. Trans Survey noted that 44.4% of transgender respondents reported recent suicidal ideation. Davidow estimates that that number is already climbing: “I am starting to hear the stories that people feel hopeless on top of hopeless.”

Akiva, the director of respites, also cofounded Wildflower’s LGBTQIA+ support group in 2012. Ten years later, he found himself wondering how to combine that sacred support group space – “one of the only places in the world where I can be myself” – with the mission of Afiya. Soon, “Anemoni,” named after a local trans woman who committed suicide at the beginning of the pandemic, was in the works.

While Afiya accommodates three people per week, or about 156 per year, Anemoni, based in Holyoke, will have five bedrooms and the potential to support 260 LGBTQIA+ people per year. Akiva, who is trans, thinks that trans folks may come to Anemoni after gender-affirming surgeries, which can be physically draining and emotionally fraught. “In order to even get surgery,” he says, “you have to have a support system in place to take care of you afterwards, so people will often lie. I’m excited to have a space where people can bring their whole selves and not feel like they have to feign being happy.”

Beauty in community

‘Wildflowers are often mistaken for weeds,” says Davidow. “But some form strong underground roots, and even have healing properties.”

“That’s us,” agrees Matty Hollander, the organization’s community coordinator in Hampden County. “We all know what it’s like to feel thrown away and not be seen as beautiful.”

Starting in 2007, Wildflower opened four community drop-in centers in Holyoke, Pittsfield, Greenfield and Springfield; today Springfield’s Bowen Center serves more than 100 people a day under the watch of Hollander and Earl Miller, the director of community supports. The Bowen Center provides free access to computers, gym equipment, a kitchenette, a washing machine and showers. People can fall asleep on the couch, attend a support group, or just sit among their community.

“We don’t think there will be a Valley Best about [our work], or a billboard about it, but you will find thousands whose lives are better because of interacting with us,” says Miller.

One of those people is Tasha Pearce, who now works at Wildflower connecting people who are transitioning from the hospital to the community. During their first visit to the Bowen Center, Pearce couldn’t get out of their car. “I’ve interacted with the mental health system in a lot of ways and some of it felt not by choice,” they explain, “so one of my fears walking in was, ‘Am I going to end up in the hospital over something I say?’”

The next day they ventured inside, where they were greeted warmly by Miller, who broke the ice with a dad joke.

“You can joke here and it feels like family,” says Hollander. “And we’re crying, too: We’re going through some tough shit and we’re able to support each other.”

Breaking the silence

In 2009 Wildflower piloted Alternatives to Suicide groups, which make space for feelings that are often seen as dangerous to oneself and society. The approach has since been replicated all over the world.

Sean Donovan, now a lead trainer for the organization, spent his first few groups just listening. The conversations got surprisingly expansive, he says, “whereas in a clinical setting, they would almost get arrested there.”

As a facilitator, Donovan guides others through thorny territory. If someone says they want to commit suicide, or shares how they might want to kill themselves, he doesn’t say “don’t.” He asks why. Donovan notes that suicidal thoughts are often related to a breakdown of relationships, unmet needs, or recurring trauma that isn’t being addressed. “A lot of people have to talk through the reasons why they want to die,” he says, “and why they would want to live.”

Marisa Russello, a community member who attended an Alternatives to Suicide training in 2019, was impressed to hear from “people who experience suicidal thoughts who know what actually helps and not just what they believe will help.” In 2022 the New York native published an article called “Talking About Suicide Helps Us Stay Alive.”

Russello writes that eliminating “silence, shame and social isolation” may reduce suicidal thinking. A 2022 study out of Australia posits that this is because isolation is replaced by “relational healing.”

“It always surprised me that such a simple and ingenious idea wasn’t spreading faster,” says Russello.

Vision of love

Before the woods and the Wi-Fi, Cindy Hadge had experienced flashes of hope. As a child, her second vision happened while she was in the hospital over the holidays. On Christmas Day, the staff herded the pediatric patients into the hallway, where someone handed out presents. But Hadge wasn’t looking at the hospital Santa; it was the woman in the long white dress bathed in light who caught her eye. “When she got close enough to me, I could feel the light,” she remembers. “I felt love, I felt peace, I felt connected to something very big without feeling small. I thought, ‘If I can just stay close to this, I’ll be alright. There is love in the world. There is good in the world.’”

But after years of sexual and physical trauma, she decided that she didn’t “qualify” for love.

This feeling of invisibility was only reinforced by the mental health system, which treated what they called hallucinations with powerful antipsychotics like Thorazine, whose side effects include tardive dyskinesia, or involuntary motor movements. In 2012, Hadge’s case worker told her how well she was doing on the medication, which dulled the hallucinations as well as her spirit. She left her apartment only to buy cigarettes. When she wasn’t planted in front of the television, she was twitching, shaking and falling down. “But you’re not getting into any trouble,” the worker noted proudly.

“I thought, ‘If that’s the treatment goal, I’m not so interested,’” says Hadge. When she searched online for “mental health peer support,” she got one result: a Hearing Voices Movement group – one of a few in the country at the time – that was within walking distance of her apartment. The international movement helps people live with and learn from their visions and voices. Today, Wildflower does the bulk of Hearing Voices trainings in the United States.

Over the next few months, Hadge’s perspective brightened as she saw that “people with the same diagnosis were building lives.” Wildflower would become her guiding light. When she tried to come off her medication and hit a rough patch, she would be one of the first people to stay at Afiya. When she traveled for the first time and became overstimulated at the airport, eight Wildflower community members, including Davidow, would form a circle around her, a human forcefield. “We have pushed your envelope and we’re going to keep pushing it to make it bigger and bigger,” Davidow would tell her. But through it all, her providers said “don’t.” Don’t go off your meds. Don’t have unrealistic expectations. Don’t you dare leave Holyoke. Don’t worry: You just have to wait for a better pill to come out.

Making meaning

‘Risk management is not the same as healing,” says Caroline Mazel-Carlton, director of training for Wildflower. She, too, is a voice hearer, but says that the amount of medication she would have to take to quiet it would stunt her humanity. She remembers a television ad for the antipsychotic Abilify, where a voiceover says brightly, “Ask about Abilify” as a woman runs through a field of flowers: “I’m like, ‘Girl, that is not what it feels like to be on antipsychotics.’”

Mazel-Carlton explains what while the biomedical model of mental health treats psychiatric experiences as the symptoms of a disease or disorder, Wildflower’s trauma-informed, harm-reduction approach views them as part of the human experience.

“The medical model with voices, for example, is quite adversarial,” she says. “It’s saying we must make this experience go away. But at Wildflower we want to create a community where it’s okay if I’m hearing voices, feel sad, feel angry, or am not seeing a pathway forward – where everyone is still accepted.”

Acceptance may be Wildflower’s superpower; there is freedom in embracing what is instead of suppressing what shouldn’t be.

“We talk amongst ourselves sometimes, about what we do,” says Davidow. “It’s not like we have any big secrets; we’re kind of saying obvious things. The bottom line is that a lot of what we do would be more humane and more effective” than the status quo.

When Mazel-Carlton attended her first Hearing Voices Movement training, she was stunned to hear about ways to help others that made common sense. “Maybe instead of asking, ‘Are you hearing a voice, yes or no?’ and then giving them an Invega shot,” says Mazel-Carlton, who now runs trainings worldwide, “maybe it’s a good idea to lean in and ask, ‘What is the voice saying? Who does the voice sound like? Has anyone ever talked to you this way? How long has it been in your life? Are there times when it’s quiet, and what are you doing in these moments?’”

A 2023 study by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology found that meaning-making can be empowering.

Cindy Hadge agrees. Today she is living “a life of discovery.” The Director of Collaborative Projects at Wildflower travels the world talking about the value of trauma-informed care.

She signs her emails, “Peace and Possibility.”

The Wildflower Alliance is looking for support around the opening of Anemoni, the first LGBTQIA+ peer respite in the world. Visit wildfloweralliance.org/donations/lgbtq to donate. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.