After the 2024 election, a small group of volunteers in Durham transformed their concern into action. Engaged Defenders for Democracy grew from a simple email chain into a grassroots movement organizing weekly demonstrations, civic engagement campaigns, and a national community dedicated to empathy, inclusion, and defending democratic values.
Young people today are growing up amid collective trauma—from school shootings and climate anxiety to social media pressure and economic uncertainty. Bounce Back Generation works with youth in underserved communities to build resilience, teach emotional regulation, and transform trauma into strength through storytelling, mentorship, and neuroscience-based tools.
The group has spurred activism in both red and blue districts, and large cities as well as rural areas. For ROOM, we have invited members to speak of the role the group has played in their capacity to find emotional balance and to act constructively in these times.
The first “Psychoanalysis in Action” event was a major demonstration outside the Kishon detention center in response to the extended detention of four men who had fired flares at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home during a protest.
In the shadows of oppression, a radical light of hope shines through screens across Afghanistan. The Voices Unveiled Self-Empowerment program is giving Afghan women what the Taliban has tried to take away: education, community, and the power to dream.
Zan Times focused our work on investigative and feature reporting. We also began training women journalists in Afghanistan over Zoom. In 2024, we trained more than 30 women journalists in Afghanistan, as well as a few in exile. Some of them are now working with us, allowing us to report from across Afghanistan.
Survival Story: An Artistic Approach to Harm Reduction was inspired by my hands-on experience in harm reduction across both states. A pivotal moment occurred as I sat in a mobile phlebotomy van, under the dim glow of a headlamp, preparing to do a blood draw on a participant in the HIV/hepatitis C treatment program with which I work. Her reluctance to seek treatment at local hospitals due to fear of judgment and trauma underscored a common narrative of stigma experienced by people who use drugs.
I Witness Silwan, begun in 2019, is neighborhood arts collaboration that supports the struggle waged by Silwan’s Palestinian residents to stay on their land.
The Depolarization Project is a group of four psychoanalysts and four people who are not in the mental health field yet are interested in the spread of toxic polarization within our society. Our group is quite diverse in terms of age, religion, and political leanings. We meet monthly to discuss readings, some of which focus on the process of toxic polarization itself, and others that have been polarizing within the field of psychoanalysis. Here group members talk about the impact of the Depolarization Project on themselves and why they continue to be involved.
This is the individual and collective story of a group of Latinx women in New York City. Over the course of a year, twenty-four women participated in Story Circles, with three to seven participants in each group sharing their journeys to the United States: the trauma beforehand, the obstacles and brutality of migration, and the struggles, challenges, and opportunities they encountered in the United States. The women (cisgender, heterosexual, LGBTQ+) came from Latin America and the Caribbean. They are undocumented; most live in western Queens, and most have children.
If you go to YouTube and search for Alice Maher and Bobby Powell, you will see me engaged in a Zoom dialogue with a man who was at the US capitol when it was stormed by Trump-supporting Republicans on Jan 6, 2021. He was convinced that the event was set up by the FBI.
Sharing our stories helps us to understand our experiences and begin to move forward in our lives. One year after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world’s healthcare system, the Things They Carry Project was launched, offering free online writing workshops (co-led by a therapist and writer) for frontline workers.
Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy created @ Work, an exuberant documentary public art installation that includes fourteen life-size canvas banners depicting images in oil of essential workers who were so vital to the survival of the city and all of us during the COVID-19 pandemic.
NOPE: Neighbors Defending Democracy is an all-volunteer group based in Washington, DC. Canvassing for Democratic candidates in battleground states, they approach voters with a respectful curiosity that seems related to the stance the analyst takes in practice. Surprisingly often, this leads to fruitful conversations across ideological, geographic, racial, and class-based divides.
Passage is an interdisciplinary call-and-response poetry, music, and prose project inspired by grief and created at the height of the pandemic. The project hinges around a single poem written by poet, scholar, and psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer, PhD. Dr. Hamer sent me, a practicing psychologist, cellist, vocalist, and composer, his poem, “Passage,” after I had asked if he had any poems about the ocean—the greatest destroyer, life-giver, and, in many ways, teacher of loss. Held by his words, Hamer’s poem spoke deeply to my feelings of grief. And I was inspired to create a series of musical pieces from his single poem. Afterward, I shared the music with him. He was, in turn, touched.