Coaching and mentoring
Individual conversations about what you’re living through and how you want to respond. My interests include neurodiversity, perceived mental illness, mental health, and spiritual, existential, moral, and religious emergencies.
Bret Warshawsky
More about my work
The experience, principles, and projects behind what I offer.
That possibility is personal to me. Experiences once interpreted as evidence of my limitations became the starting point for my education, relationships, and life’s work. It took years of inquiry and support to understand them differently.
Mental Wealth is where I bring that experience to others. We can explore distress and uncertainty alongside creativity, spirituality, desire, and purpose. There is room for what hurts and for what you hope your life might become.
Understanding and choices
Help making sense of unfamiliar experiences, talking across differences, and considering options for support. We attend to relationships and to the wishes and agency of the person at the center.
Education and collaboration
Work with therapists, psychiatrists, hospitals, holistic practitioners, nonprofits, and companies. I contribute a peer perspective to staff learning, service design, and conversations about alternatives to existing care.
Private arrangements · By conversation
Private & Concierge Mentoring
I work with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families in trusted, private settings. Depending on the circumstances, this can include extended engagement and live-in concierge peer support, bringing our work into the routines, relationships, and decisions of daily life.
I want to put my cards on the table about why I offer this work. Wealth does not remove the need for understanding, companionship, or help. These clients deserve the same care and respect as anyone else. I also intend to generate substantial income to realize my larger dream: mental-health reformation across the country, with new infrastructure for care, community, and meaningful lives.
Everyone deserves help. Building a financially ambitious practice is one way I intend to resource that wider commitment.
In development
Spiritual Psychiatry
I am developing an adjunct peer-support offering alongside a board-certified adult, child and adolescent, and addiction psychiatrist with decades of clinical experience and a professorship at a major university medical school. His work explores spiritual and religious experience in relation to addiction, trauma, and mental health.
The intention is to bring clinical expertise and lived experience into conversation around spiritual emergence, distress, meaning, and integration. My contribution is peer mentoring and education, alongside the psychiatrist’s separate clinical role. The collaboration and arrangements are being developed.
Retreats & Group Experiences
I am also exploring retreats and group events at the Center for Spiritual Awakening in Holmdel, New Jersey, sponsored by the Human Faith Project nonprofit. These would offer opportunities for shared inquiry into spirituality, dignity, relationships, and creativity, welcoming people of any faith or none.
Program details and dates will be shared as arrangements are confirmed.
Understanding the mental health system and its implications
I have been irrevocably harmed by psychiatry, the mental health system, medications, and the principles and values used to justify my treatment. I know many others who have paid a lasting price, and people around the world have spoken about similar harm. Having someone with that experience in your corner can matter. I am not categorically against psychiatry, services, or medication. I am honest, brutally honest, about how dangerous, consuming, and victimizing they can be. You deserve to understand those possibilities before deciding what care to accept. I’ve paid the price, and I want to help others make informed choices so they don’t have to.
Empowerment, freedom, respect, and agency.
People deserve to understand what they are entering when they engage psychiatric services. I help individuals and families examine programs, medications, and approaches, including their implications, potential consequences, and the questions worth asking.
I know how much personal attention these experiences deserve, and how difficult an overstretched system can make it to receive that care. My work can complement traditional services or help people explore alternatives and assemble a different network of support.
Our conversations may draw on narrative practices, archetypal systems, holistic approaches, or AI-assisted reflection. We discuss what each can offer and use it where it helps your inquiry.
I offer peer support and education. I am not a physician or licensed therapist, and I do not diagnose or prescribe. Medication changes should be discussed with a qualified prescriber.
How I work
The method is inquiry.
Bring your question
After thirty years of inquiry, I have perspectives to offer. I also want to understand yours, including where we disagree. The conversation stays open, and decisions about your life remain yours.
Explore through experience
We work with the questions in front of you, try what seems useful, and return to what happens. Depending on the situation, that might involve personal reflection, a family conversation, a creative project, or practical questions about care and community.
Agree on a beginning
To begin, tell me what you’re looking for. We’ll discuss whether I can help and agree on a format, frequency, and fee. Organizational work can begin with a talk, workshop, or advisory conversation.
Law enforcement & crisis response
The person.
The encounter.
What happens next.
Lived-experience education and dialogue for police departments, officers, and crisis-response partners.
Explore a conversation or session ↗The person inside the encounter
I speak from experience of losing my freedom and being taken into psychiatric care. I bring that perspective into conversations with officers about what it feels like to be the person in distress, how an encounter unfolds, and what dignity and agency mean in those moments.
My focus includes the ride, the handoff, and the care that follows. Connecting someone to a service is consequential. Where are they being taken? What might happen there? What other support or community-based alternatives could be available?
Did you know?
Part of this work is an introduction to ideas, resources, and literature officers may not have encountered: the Z65.8 category for moral, religious, or spiritual problems, peer respite homes, EmPATH (Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment, and Healing) crisis-stabilization services, interfaith approaches, and writing on spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency.
I bring my peer story into that exploration, connecting personal experience with questions officers can carry into their work. What else might help us understand this person? What support exists beyond the familiar options? Who in the community could help? Sessions bring awareness, education, lived experience, and open dialogue together.
The care that follows
Through talks, facilitated discussions, and advisory collaboration, I help connect lived experience with the practical questions facing law enforcement. This work can complement existing crisis-intervention education and peer perspectives, while opening conversation about respite, relationships, and better pathways beyond hospitalization.
Officers do not control the whole system, and what happens after a handoff is not theirs alone to carry. But wouldn’t it feel good to understand the wider picture and know that the person you’ve helped is being welcomed somewhere they can feel safe, be heard, and receive thoughtful care?
That is part of the invitation: to explore what peer respite houses and other community-based alternatives can offer, where available and appropriate, and to help create more of those possibilities. I want officers to feel connected to the people and places receiving someone, and to take satisfaction in contributing to a more humane path through distress.
Talks & presentations
What my life
has taught me.
For organizations, communities, businesses, hospitals, and the people they bring together.
Invite me to speak ↗A life inside and beyond the system
I speak about my life inside and beyond the psychiatric system: what happened, what I’ve seen, and the hope I’ve carried out of experiences that once seemed to close off my future.
That story includes the harsh realities of mental-health services and of living at the edges. I talk about being misunderstood, losing freedom, questioning the explanations I was given, and finding people and possibilities that helped me build a life.
When wounds become gifts
Over time, I came to recognize my wounds as gifts. The experiences that hurt me also shaped my attention, my questions, and my capacity to meet others. Much of what I bring to my community now grew from that recognition.
Shape the conversation for your setting
Talks can focus on lived experience, perceived mental illness, spiritual emergence, dignity and agency, or the practical work of creating better options for care. I welcome conversation with audiences, including difficult questions and disagreement.
We can shape a personal talk, a presentation with discussion, or a workshop for your setting. The Happiness Agenda offers a related, participatory approach centered on people’s passions.
Explore The Happiness Agenda ↗Education & genius
There’s a genius
born every minute.
When I speak of genius, I’m referring to the word’s original sense: the inherent essence and spirit we’re born with, which only we can offer to the world. That genius may take many forms over a lifetime. It may become an exceptional skill or craft. Ultimately, I mean the exceptional human being you are, living your destiny.
My understanding of education holds two related ideas: nurturing and cultivating, and drawing out what is already within someone. I want to help people meet their genius and give it conditions in which to grow.
This is why passions matter in my work. What someone loves can tell us something that an assessment or a diagnosis misses. Taking it seriously can change the conversation about who they are and what they might do.
In yourself
Recognizing your own experience and learning how you want to live.
In love
Exploring intimacy, desire, and how you meet another person.
In kinship
Understanding differences within families, friendships, and communities.
In the world
Giving your gifts expression through your work, calling, and contribution.
About Bret
How I came
to this work.
1994–2011A formative period of involvement in the psychiatric and overall mental health system.
2006–2008UMDNJ psychosocial rehabilitation certificate program and internship.
2012–presentMy hero’s journey and homecoming: international inquiry, community, co-creation, and bringing what I’ve learned home to New Jersey.
From the inside
At nineteen, while studying film in New York, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and involuntarily hospitalized. Over the years that followed, I experienced the psychiatric system from inside it. Questions about dignity, freedom, and who gets to interpret another person’s experience became unavoidable.
I later completed UMDNJ’s two-year psychosocial rehabilitation certificate program. During my internship at CSPNJ in Eatontown, I developed The Happiness Agenda, working with people through their interests and passions.
An education in the world
For the past fifteen years, my education has continued through grassroots mental-health inquiry and coaching, international travel, and collaborative communities. I worked directly with the late futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard and co-created Synergy Hub 1.0 in Rotterdam, a sixteen-month experiment in gift economy, shared resources, and self-organization.
I’m an autodidact. Approximately 180 college credits, twenty-five years of independent study, and the experience of putting ideas into practice have shaped how I think. I do not hold a college degree. I bring the knowledge I earned through that study, my formal certificate training, and a life lived in inquiry.
A community around the work
I’m part of an international community of change agents, practitioners, researchers, artists, and experts across many fields. These are people I learn from, turn to, and collaborate with. In mental health, those relationships include journalists, clinicians, interfaith leaders, peer advocates, and technologists actively working to change how people are understood and supported.
Today I’m bringing those experiences into education, peer mentoring, film, and technology. The same questions run through the work: how do we recognize what each person brings, care for one another, and organize ourselves so more becomes possible?
My cards on the table
I earned this
education by living it.
I want my clients, customers, allies, and partners to know exactly who they’re working with. I have no advanced degree or advanced professional certification. I completed UMDNJ’s psychosocial rehabilitation certificate program, including an internship. My broader education has been self-directed, lived, studied, and pursued with everything I have.
I say that with joy and confidence. For the work I specialize in, I believe my life is my strongest qualification. I have lived through what I question, studied it for decades, and committed my time, resources, and creativity to discovering what else is possible.
I’ve earned the right to criticize the mental health system and psychiatry. I criticize by creating. My response takes shape in peer support, education, stories, technologies, and efforts to build better places for people to turn.
I’m a polymath. I have taught myself across disciplines and learned alongside people whose genius takes many forms. What I bring is an informed, experienced understanding of how mental health, consciousness, spirituality, creativity, technology, philanthropy, and community interconnect. Seeing those relationships, and finding something useful to do with them, is my special sauce.
I believe I bring something exceptional to this work. Every part of my life has contributed to it, and I stand behind what I have to offer.
“I would much rather keep the conversation open than win it.”
Principles and values
What animates
my work.
I call my larger practice evolutionary and spiritual philanthropy. Philanthropy means love of humanity to me. It begins in how I meet people and extends into what we make together, how resources move, and whose lives benefit.
In What I Actually Sacrificed, I wrote about giving up control and dominance while still wanting to lead. That distinction matters in mentoring and collaboration: I can bring conviction, initiative, and experience while respecting another person’s freedom.
Money, creativity, and entrepreneurship have a place in that practice. I want the work to sustain the people doing it and help build the communities, opportunities, and forms of care we need.
The voices below have accompanied that inquiry. They speak to coming alive, remaining humble, expressing our gifts, and taking responsibility for what we can contribute.
My Four Pillars
Co-creation is healing.
Making something together can create relationships, purpose, and new possibilities.
Unity in neurodiversity.
Our differences belong in the room. They are part of what we can create together.
Passion is the gateway drug.
What brings us alive can open a way into learning, connection, and contribution.
Step into the preposterous.
Stay curious beyond what today’s assumptions allow us to imagine.
At the edge of possibility
“Any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous.”
Futurist Joseph Voros calls the dividing line between futures we consider possible and those we dismiss as preposterous the Clarke-Dator Boundary. Crossing it means entertaining ideas our present assumptions might reject as ridiculous or impossible. Those judgments can change: the Moon landing once belonged in that territory.
For me, stepping into the preposterous means staying curious beyond that boundary, long enough to discover what we might bring into being.
Voices that accompany the work
“Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend”
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. And as we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
More quotes that inform my work
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
“Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.”
“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”
“Belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness, an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching.”Source ↗
“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”Source ↗
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
Projects & collaboration
Putting the
ideas to work.
My projects connect personal experience with the practical work of changing how we create, share resources, and care for people.
Community · Civil rights · Mental-health reformation
Mental Health Reformation Consortium
A Civil Rights Moviement for the Soul
I’m working to bring people, communities, and organizations together around greater dignity, agency, and choice in mental health. The work connects lived experience with efforts to create community-based alternatives and infrastructure that people can return to, participate in, and help shape.
Read the Civil Rights Moviement summary ↗Film · Philanthropy · Community
Social Effects NJ
Through Filmanthropy by Design and Regenerative Filmmaking, I explore how giving and community benefit can be built into a production from the beginning. The Filmanthropy Ledger gathers examples of what film has already made possible.
Social Effects and the Filmanthropy Ledger ↗Mental-health reformation
Unbreakable Spirit
My developing docuseries continues the story I began in “The Hero’s Journey,” my chapter in Lisa Nichols’s 2011 book Unbreakable Spirit. It connects that personal history with efforts to build better care, community, and alternatives in New Jersey. I want the making of the series to contribute to the work it documents.
Read my personal account ↗Story · Technology · Co-creation
Storylivingry Studio
A home for a wider portfolio of projects and innovations across story, media, AI, community, and new ways of living and creating together. The Studio connects stories with real-life experiments, opening several possibilities for collaboration, philanthropy, and investment. Explore the portfolio to discover what you might help bring into being.
Explore the Studio and its projects ↗Regenerative film · Care infrastructure · New Jersey
Mental Health Film Moonshot
The making of a film as an engine for lasting change.
What if a film helped build the places and possibilities its story calls for? This proposal brings regenerative filmmaking into conversation with mental health reformation: exploring how production, philanthropy, and public and private partnerships could help create crisis-care spaces, peer respite homes, and community infrastructure that continue serving people after the cameras leave.
The Practical Moonshot page sets out a New Jersey use case in two decks, alongside a larger thought experiment about what a single production could make possible. It is an invitation to help develop the model and shape what happens next.
Explore the Mental Health Film Moonshot ↗Writing · Media · Conversations · Work in progress
The Syntony Times
A living home for the whole inquiry.
My writing, ideas, and unfolding work in one place, connecting mental health reformation, evolutionary and spiritual philanthropy, creativity, consciousness, and the ways we live together.
I’m building The Syntony Times into a dynamic home for my work and media: essays, films, audio, conversations, experiments, and dispatches from the projects themselves. A place to follow the connections, meet the people involved, and take part as the work develops.
Explore The Syntony Times ↗Evolutionary & Spiritual Philanthropy
The love of humanity.
Put into practice.
For private philanthropists, family offices, and people and projects reinventing how we give, receive, and care for the planet as a whole.
Explore your next bold step ↗When I say philanthropy, I mean the love of humanity. My inquiry begins with who we are being as we give: our relationship to money, power, trust, and one another. The way resources are offered and received is already shaping the world they are meant to serve.
I work with people who want to bring that inquiry into their lives and philanthropic work. You may be reconsidering your giving, developing an initiative, or seeking a bold new way to put your resources in service of life. We explore what you care about, what your resources could make possible, and how to support people’s agency without making generosity a means of control.
Through education, dialogue, advisory collaboration, and introductions where there is a fit, I help connect inner commitments with practical choices. That can include clarifying an intention, developing a project, exploring gift-based and regenerative approaches, or bringing people and disciplines into a shared effort.
Money matters, and so do time, relationships, land, creativity, and the freedom to act. I’m interested in how these capacities can work together for the greatest benefit of humanity and the living planet. I bring thirty years of inquiry and lived experimentation, and an invitation to ask better questions together.
Begin where you intend to arrive.
If our destination is a world shaped by generosity, dignity, and cooperation, those qualities belong in the beginning: in the relationships we build, the decisions we share, and the way resources move.
Read my philanthropy writing ↗
Interested in supporting my own projects? See the separate invitation to support the work ↓
My Fees
Let’s make
good work possible.
My fees are context-dependent. I believe every situation is unique, and I’d love to support as many people and possibilities as I can.
A wide spectrum
My range extends from completely gifting work to some people and organizations, to very substantial fees for organizations, private individuals, and families able to exchange a high level of value and impact. The scope, commitment, resources involved, and what we can accomplish together all matter.
Agreed together
All fees are negotiated during exploration. We agree on the work and the terms before we begin.
Need a quote?
If you need a quote, send me a little about what you’re looking for, who it’s for, and the timing. We can take the conversation from there.
Ask about fees or request a quote ↓For Philanthropists & Investors
Let’s be honest.
My ambitions are preposterous.
My ambitions are preposterous, and I’m putting the practical invitation on the table. I want to help catalyze mental health reformation across this country and beyond, bringing regenerative film, community, and new infrastructure together at a scale that can change people’s lives. I’m not going to pretend that’s a modest undertaking.
I welcome philanthropists, investors, and advisors who feel a deep resonance with these missions and my portfolio of innovations and thought leadership. You may be drawn to one project, to the connections across them, or to supporting me as the person bringing this work into being.
A five-year runway
$95,000
Per year · Personal gifts
$95,000 a year for five years, offered as unconditional personal gifts. This is a runway for me to thrive as the source, founder, visionary, and leader: time and capacity to create, develop, connect, and carry the work. One person could offer the full amount, or many people could share in it. These are gifts, freely given, without purchasing ownership, control, or obligations in return.
$1 million
Annual operating budget
A separate annual operating budget of $1 million. This would begin the rollout of the mental health reformation and its Evolutionary and Spiritual Philanthropy Fund, resourcing the people, development, production, partnerships, and coordination that turn the vision into work on the ground. The five-year horizon gives that work room to take root. Larger film and infrastructure ambitions would have their own budgets and pathways.
Begin as we mean to become.
I’m committed to generating revenue and funding this work myself wherever I can, acting as my own philanthropist and investor. I also welcome others who want to nourish its beginnings.
For me, unconditional gifting must precede or accompany outside investment. The gift stands on its own, without purchasing ownership, control, or a promise of return. Any investment is a separate agreement.
That order matters. My work has a destination rooted in evolutionary and spiritual philanthropy. Its beginnings must embody that same generosity, freedom, and trust. How we support the person, how resources move, and how we enter relationships are already part of what we’re creating. I want to begin where I intend to arrive.
Perhaps we’re looking for each other.
I’m excited by the possibility of a circle of advisors, philanthropists, and investors bringing their different capacities to this work. I would also welcome one extraordinary ally able to contribute substantially, or a combination of both.
I don’t know how long it will take me to generate the resources the larger vision deserves. If you have substantial financial capacity and share these ambitions, we could catalyze a quick, decisive, large-scale effort: the practical moonshot of regenerative film and lasting change in mental health infrastructure.
You may be looking for somewhere to put your resources that feels equal to your own ambitions for the world. I’m looking for people with whom these possibilities can become real. That invitation is always open.
Let’s explore what we could make possible ↗Contact
Let’s get to
know each other.
Tell me what you need, what you’re looking for, or what you’d like to explore together. Write an email, use the form below, or send an audio or video message through WhatsApp or Telegram.
Based in New Jersey · Remote and in-person work by arrangement