Jazmine Russell

Jazmine Russell is a mental health educator, trauma-informed Holotropic Breathwork practitioner, writer and community organizer. She co-founded the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, a non-profit that brings together professional and lived experience of mental health issues to advance transformative, rights-based mental health education. She also hosts the Depth Work Podcast and works as a scholar of critical psychology, Mad Studies and neuroscience.

Her work grows out of her own story. She grew up in Sacramento, California, and earned a degree in Applied Psychology at NYU on a scholarship. She then worked as a crisis counselor and junior clinician for a New York mental health agency. What she saw there, and her own experience of the mental health system, left her convinced that the prevailing model obscures the many roots of distress. A period of intense altered states and spiritual awakening became a turning point. She changed her life, began studying holistic health modalities and moved to upstate New York.

She went on to become an advocate, facilitating workshops on mental health alternatives and peer support with grassroots groups such as The Icarus Project NYC. She became a certified peer specialist (NYCPS) and worked for The Parachute Program, which is based on the Open Dialogue Model. Her studies have included intuitive development, breathwork, energy work, meditation and embodiment practices, and herbalism.

She is the creator of DEPTH (Deep Emotional Processing and Trauma Healing) sessions, which combine embodiment, meditation, spiritual and energy work, and compassionate dialogue. Through teaching, writing, research, interviews with experts and work with clients, she aims to challenge conventional ideas about mental health. She argues that health cannot be separated from lived experience, ancestral history, physiology, systemic oppression, and spirituality and meaning-making.