Why is this subject, “Making Your Crazy Work For You,” important in the world?
Right now, we are seeing the culmination of decades of trauma coming to a head post-pandemic in the setting of 2 major regional conflicts erupting in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since the turn of the century, we have seen the 9/11 attacks, multiple large-scale natural disasters, chronic military conflict, a rising wave of radicalism in the United States and abroad, financial disruption, rising gun violence, increasing natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, social and political upheavals, and the rise of information technology and artificial intelligence. Rates of mental illness and suicide have risen precipitously, burnout and job instability are on the rise, the traditional family structure is breaking down with expanding generational divides impacting the workforce, and we are still adjusting to massive grief from both deaths during the pandemic and heavy strain on an already over-taxed healthcare system lacking proper mental health services.
Disaster and crisis response services have limited capacity and are generally under-prepared and under-resourced, and companies and institutions, likewise by and large, are only able to deal effectively with limited strain – leadership is partly aware of these vulnerabilities but is hard-pressed to allocate scarce resources given lean budgets and difficulty with understanding the need for longer-range planning and preparation. Many institutions offer wellness programs, but they are inadequate to deal with burnout, mental health, substance, and stress-related reactions, which undermine organizational productivity and undermine worker health and satisfaction. In addition, the mass traumas of the last century continue to haunt the present in the form of under-recognized intergenerational trauma, exacerbating more contemporary issues and driving them to repeat over and over.
What is the pressing issue right and how are you addressing it?
Across my many roles, I am directly addressing the impact of the above concerns. In my private practice, I work with individuals to provide psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment. In not-for-profit roles, I work on the macro level to develop better systems, provide training and resources for psychological first aid and ongoing response, work with organizations on trauma-informed consulting, burnout mitigation, and resilience training, and work with leadership to better understand the impact of such problems on the organization and workforce, and I am engaged with education both through teaching doctors in training, working with therapists around the world, and developing resources for professionals including textbooks and training as well as the general public through books and popular media, including my blog “ExperiMentations” on Psychology Today, which has received over 13 million views alongside a podcast I co-host to draw attention to and inform listeners about an array of mental health and wellness related-subjects, the Doorknob Comments Podcast.
Dr. Grant Brenner Biography
What is your background in this subject?
I’m a physician board-certified in Psychiatry, with additional training in psychoanalysis, organizational psychodynamics, disaster and crisis mental health response, the treatment of post-traumatic and dissociative disorders, and over 2 decades of working in private practice, founding and exiting a company, and working in not-for-profit disaster mental health response. I am on the Board of Vibrant Emotional Health, which runs the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, where I am co-Chair of the Crisis Emotional Care Team Advisory Board, am on the Board of Languages of Care, which translates disaster and crisis mental health materials into many languages, and co-Chair the Disaster, Trauma and Global Health Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, a thinktank. I have written numerous books and chapters on various aspects of trauma recovery and response and am one of the developers of the Chronic Cyclical Disasters Model, designed to support improved disaster and crisis services for multiple overlapping events.
What is something that most people don’t know about you?
I have a passion for the arts, and in the past, I have painted and written poetry. More recently, I have put more energy into my love of photography and have enjoyed time spent creating images to both express important ideas and find resilience through aesthetic experience, often found walking the streets of NYC. Most recently, I co-founded a mental health film festival – the Urban Dreams Mental Health Film Festival – to draw attention to mental health issues and give viewers the opportunity to understand first-hand what people ordinarily stigmatized and hidden away deal with every day.
What are your passions outside of your career?
In addition to the arts, I love music, nature, people-watching, and spending time with my family.
Are there any social causes that you believe in and support?
Mental health advocacy and diversity, equity, and inclusion are important to me. I dream of a day when we can live in peace together as a human family, finding room for our differences with mutual respect and dialogue.
What is next for you?
We’re in the process of developing the Chronic Cyclical Disasters Model framework to make it more accessible to multiple groups and develop tools and materials available for both training and preparedness and also for advocacy with policy and grant-makers. The newly updated professional handbook Disaster Psychiatry: Readiness, Evaluation, and Treatment is in its second edition, under review by the publisher, with updated material focusing on contemporary and anticipated future problems. The 2nd Urban Dreams Mental Health Film Festival is in the planning stages, and I hope someday to realize a collective healing project that involves bringing people together from around the world to share their views in both print and digital form – this is affectionately entitled The Bright Orange Book Project. My colleagues and I conducted a study looking at the attachment style of Gen Z (Gen AI) in the workplace to understand the role of upbringing childhood adversity and resilience in adapting to working life after school. We are analyzing data from a large survey we conducted and are writing a business psychology book to assist managers and leaders with common scenarios encountered in the post-pandemic workplace.
Making Your Crazy Work For You
Tell me about your book.
Our most recent book, Making Your Crazy Work For You: From Trauma and Isolation to Self-Acceptance and Love, focuses on providing a path for individuals seeking to recover from and thrive following earlier trauma. We start with education about trauma and dissociation (a disconnection with the self, for example, of thoughts from feelings or different parts of oneself from the whole), building a framework for understanding the recovery process. We lay a foundation of self-compassion practice to shift from blame and criticism to a curiosity-driven growth mindset, provide tools for conflict resolution and constructive dialogue, and bring readers through the DREAM Sequence, an ecosystem of healing starting with Discovery, and adding layers of synergistic Repair, Empowerment, Alternatives – to expand choices, and Mutuality. The ultimate goal is to shift one’s relationship with oneself in order to become self-integrated with greater function in multiple domains, better relationships, and a strong and cohesive sense of self.
Our prior books, Interrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy and Relationship Sanity: Creating and Maintaining Health Relationships, take, respectively, a deep dive into the concept of relationship dysfunction and offer a hands-on model for couples seeking greater relationship satisfaction. I also have co-edited and contributed to Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience: Integrating Care in Disaster Relief Work, geared toward disaster responders, and one of the first textbooks of its kind, which was published based on experiences working in 9/11 and other disasters earlier in the 21st Century.
5 Reasons Why Toxic Relationships Affect Your Financial Decisions(Opens in a new browser tab)
Where can people buy the book?
Our books are available at popular bookstores online and brick-and-mortar and from our wonderful publisher, Central Recovery Press.
