The Happiness Agenda

Dignity beyond diagnosis, from someone who has been in the bed and went on to live.

My story

I have been in the bed. I have done the day program. I got a life anyway.

Multiple hospitalizations, Carrier Clinic among them. The system made some hard predictions about what my life would be. Most of them turned out wrong.

Since then I have traveled the world, followed my bliss, and built a life I was told I would not get, and I am still in the work.

The frame

Recovery is not a finish line. It is a life journey of conscious evolution, whatever the diagnosis.

I am not cured and I am not preaching. I am in it, like everyone else, working on myself for the long haul, no matter the label, no matter the medication.

I am not here to argue with anyone's medication. That is each person's own call. I am pointing at a part of recovery that rarely gets talked about.

Why a story like mine is useful in the room

People need to see it is possible.

For clients

Proof, in the flesh, that a life after the worst days is real, from someone who sat where they are sitting.

For staff

A reminder of who they are actually serving, a person and not a chart, and why the work matters.

For the day

An honest, hopeful jolt that is hard to get from a worksheet or a group curriculum.

Where this comes from

I did not just live it. I worked inside the system, too.

I completed the UMDNJ Psychosocial Rehabilitation program (2006 to 2008), with my internship at CSPNJ Eatontown in 2007 to 2008. There I developed and ran my own project with the people we served, called The Happiness Agenda.

What the Happiness Agenda was

It was built on a simple idea: that the people we serve are dignified human beings first, beyond their diagnosis, and beyond whatever the system has told them they are or can be.

Instead of organizing the day around symptoms and deficits, I connected with people around their passions, what actually moved them and what brought them joy, and we leaned into it. We took those sparks seriously and built from there.

The premise

Meeting someone at what is alive in them is not a break from recovery. It is one of the most direct routes into it.

When a person is inside something they love, the diagnosis loosens its grip for a while, and they get to be, simply, themselves. That doorway is what brings people back.

What I could bring you

However it fits your setting.

A short talkMy story, for clients, for staff, or both. Sometimes that alone is the medicine.

A workshopHands-on, around passions, spirituality, or life after discharge, connecting people to what is alive in them.

Something ongoingA recurring version of the Happiness Agenda, run alongside your team, and over time teaching staff to hold it themselves.

Where I would love this to go

One day a week, in a few good places, helping people find what is alive in them.

Start with a single talk or workshop. If it lands, we build from there. The dream is simple: be the person in the room I would have given anything to have when I was nineteen.

A little more about me

Bret Warshawsky is a writer, speaker, futurist, and polymath working at the intersection of consciousness, story, systems change, and mental health reform. After thirty-plus years of living with perceived mental illness, thirteen-plus of them off psychiatric medication and still in the work, his perspective on what the system calls illness and what other traditions call spiritual emergence is earned from the inside. His body of work spans more than a decade of international systems-design and co-creation, including thirteen years building Symphonics with creative partner Andrea Harding, direct collaboration with the late futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the co-creation of Synergy Hub 1.0 in Rotterdam, a sixteen-month gift-economy living experiment. Today he is the co-visionary behind the Mental Health Reformation and AWARE App for Spiritual Emergency in New Jersey with business partner Janet Werner, and the creator of A One Mind Show and other innovative projects relating to mental health and beyond.

Read the fuller story → My mental-health writing · The Syntony Times My larger work · Storylivingry Studio

Let's talk

If there is a place for this where you are, I would love to bring it.

Bret Warshawsky · bret@bretwarshawsky.com · 908-992-1711