For this episode, we handed the podcast studio over to one of our UCLA interns from the Luskin School of Public Affairs, Mei-Mei Barnhardt. She interviews Marc Novick who brings a wealth of lived experience to his role as a case manager for Project 180, a program that is focused upon diversion and reentry programs for people involved in the criminal justice system.

Since late last year, Heart Forward has been involved in a Hilton Foundation-funded project which involves taking a deeper look at the residential ecosystem that is connected to LA County’s Office of Diversion and Reentry (ODR). This program, working in concert with Superior Court judges in the criminal and mental health courts, offers programs that divert individuals with serious mental, physical or behavioral health needs from jail into community-based care, housing and supportive services.

The Heart Forward team, as part of this project, has been visiting various service providers who staff these residential placements, and when we visited Project 180’s Crescent House last fall, one enthusiastic member of the case management team captured our attention. That was Marc. Mei-Mei, in particular, was drawn to his positive energy and asked if she could meet with him to learn more about his life.

As she relayed back to us the substance of their three-hour meeting – where he candidly shared his challenges with family trauma and addition, starting at a very young age, we thought he would be a great candidate for an interview. And, in the spirit of promoting student learning, we offered Mei-Mei the opportunity to take the reins in the podcast studio.

His journey out of addiction is inspirational, and undergirds the role he plays as a peer supporter with other men facing similar life challenges.

With special recognition to our key sponsors:

• Presenting Sponsor, Tony Hale
• Community Impact Sponsor, Peter Lizotte

And a special thank you to those who have helped to make this season possible:

Sarah Dusseault, Brian Folb, Dave Pilon, Nick Halaris, Jae Lee and David Israelian.

This season starts off with a wonderful conversation with Dr. Gordon Flett, Professor Emeritus in Psychology at York University in Canada and the author of the 2018 book, The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need to be Significant. Dr. Flett’s research into “mattering” – which he started in the 1980’s -- seems to be finding a contemporary relevance in the 21st century as our society trends toward social isolation and loneliness.

His work resonates with Heart Forward because of our belief that the human posture of coming alongside people, and practicing radical hospitality in our relationships, can be transformative for all involved. Flett, who is considered one of the global experts on this topic, believes that the experience of mattering is critical for human well-being and a sense of flourishing. As you will hear, this is not the same as a sense of belonging or self-esteem. People need to feel seen and heard and they yearn to know that they are making a difference or add value in some way.

Dr. Flett has been busy in his so-called retirement from academic life and has appeared on several podcasts and interviews in the past year. Here are some helpful links:

Hidden Brain podcast: Do you Feel Invisible (Feb 2026)

Hidden Brain podcast: A Secret Source of Connection (June 2026) Dr. Flett responds to listener questions and comments sparked by the February podcast)

The Oprah Podcast: How Mattering to Yourself & Others Can Change Your Life with Oprah, Jennifer Wallace & Ina Garten (January 2026)

Books and publications

The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need to be Significant. Dr. Gordon Flett. Published 2018.

The Healing Power and Potential of Mattering. APA PsycNet.

Other resources

Mattering in Action | Making Schools More Human

Why ‘Mattering’ Is a Key Part of Mental Health - The New York Times

Ted Talk Des Moines Nov 2021 Angela Maiers – You Matter Gordon L. Flett. 2026

With special recognition to our key sponsors:

• Presenting Sponsor, Tony Hale
• Community Impact Sponsor, Peter Lizotte

And a special thank you to those who have helped to make this season possible:

Sarah Dusseault, Brian Folb, Dave Pilon, Nick Halaris, Jae Lee and David Israelian.

Welcome to Season Six of Heart Forward Conversations from the Heart. After dedicating all of Season Five to voices from Trieste, for the next 10 episodes we’ve returned home. I am excited to share with you some amazing people and their work from which I know you will draw inspiration and hope.

We will explore this simple question:

What if the way we treat people is just as important as the services we provide? Or, perhaps, more important?

As you know, if you’ve been on this journey with us so far, we characterize this culture of coming alongside fellow human beings as Radical Hospitality.

It is fundamentally simple:

We see you. We hear you. You are safe here. Your voice matters.

This season we'll explore what happens when those values move beyond philosophy and become everyday practice. We'll talk with researchers, practitioners, advocates, and people with lived experience who are challenging the way we think about recovery, belonging, addiction, community, and what it means to truly matter.

You'll hear conversations with Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries, psychologist Dr. Gordon Flett, experts in diversion and recovery, and others who press for system change and ask us to reimagine how we care for one another.

If you believe there is a more humane way to approach mental health care, you’re in the right place.

If you are interested to partner with Heart Forward as one of our sponsors, which helps us to avoid monetization and the pop up of annoying ads mid-sentence, please explore our sponsorship package HERE. A direct link to our Donor Portal is provided HERE.

Subscribe now, and join us for Season Six of Conversations from the Heart. New episodes begin in August.

With appreciation always to our technical producer, Aaron Stern of Capstone Audio.

Support this podcast with a contribution of any amount HERE

Meet Mario Colucci, a psychiatrist who has worked in a variety of roles in the Trieste system for over 30 years. He is currently the director of the Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment Service , which is linked to the general emergency room of the civil hospital in Udine, in the same region of Trieste.

I consider him “the psychiatrist’s philosopher” because of his keen intellect and how he effortlessly weaves philosophy into telling the story of Basaglia.

In this interview, we explore four themes:

• Philosophy – and how it impacted the thinking of Franco Basaglia in the 1960’s
• Education of psychiatrists – then and now
• Power dynamics between clinician and patient – and power-sharing
• The “total institution”

To provide some additional resource material to follow along in the conversation, the following links may be helpful.

General discussion of phenomenology.

Four influential books that coincidentally were published in 1961, the same year that Franco Basaglia was assigned to the asylum in Gorizia:

• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Michel Foucault (1961)
• Asylums. Erving Goffman. (1961)
• The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon. (1961)
• The Land of Remorse. Ernesto de Martino (1961)

Additionally, Dr. Colucci provided additional resources from his own research. In 2001, he and Pierangelo Di Vittorio wrote the first monograph on Basaglia. In 2024, they wrote a book and the links to the abstract and the book are provided below.

Franco Basaglia. Thought, Practices, Politics [abstract from a book written by Mario Colucci and Pierangelo Di Vittorio] 2001 by Edizioni Bruno Mondadori, Italy. 2005 by Éditions Érès, France; 2006 by Ediciones Nueva Visión, Argentina; 2020 by Edizioni Alpha Beta, Italy; 2024 by Meltemi Editore, Italy.

Franco Basaglia. Pensiero, pratiche, politica. Mario Colucci and Pierangelo Di Vittorio. 2024

Here is a link to an article, “The Issue of Violence in Psychiatry,” written by Colucci in April, 2025.

Foucault and Psychiatric Power after Madness and Civilization[Published in Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard (eds.), Michel Foucault and Power Today:
International Multidisciplinary Studies in the History of the Present. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.]

Medicalisation. Mario Colucci. SISSA – International School for Advanced Studies Journal of Science Communication ISSN 1824 – 2049 http://jcom.sissa.it/ JCOM 5 (1), March 2006

Psychiatrie et santé mentale: une quer

Stefania Grimaldi works with the social cooperative La Collina in Trieste Italy. This particular social cooperative was formed in 1988 and employees 200 people, 35 percent of which are considered “disadvantaged.”

In this episode, we briefly explore the origins of the social cooperative network in Trieste – starting with the first one called the Basaglia SC, which was features recently in a movie called 50 Years of CLU.

We explore the two different types of social cooperatives – Type A and Type B. In particular, we are interested in the Type B social cooperative because e they train and employ people who fall int the disadvantaged sector – which can involve physical and mental disability, substance use addiction and past experience with incarceration.

What is interesting is how the social cooperative must operate like a business and coimpete in the market place to secure contracts to provide labor and services. La Collina will be competing with other private entities – and therefore their workforce must be up to the job. We explore their pathway to work which involves mentoring and internship before full employment status is achieved. The cost of the internship is underwritten by the health agency, ASUGI.

The take-aways for an American audience are threefold:

· Work is a human right, guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Rights for Persons with Disabilities.

· So-called disadvantaged workers can achieve full employment and pursue their life aspirations

· The proper supports must be in place to ensure people are trained and prepared to pursue their employment goals

Michele Sipala is a peer support worker at Recovery House, located in the heart of the city centre in Trieste. Recovery House provides a six-month transitional residential environment for six young people, age 18 – 35, to help give a “kick start” into more independent living. Recovery House was started in 2015 and over the past nine years, it has served 55 young people.

In this conversation, we discuss the unique needs of younger people in the mental health services in Trieste who are transitioning into the adult service sector – with changes to their clinical supports and all the stresses and challenges that can accompany an expectation of moving into adult life. He reiterates the three pillars of their mental health system: the importance of work, home and socialization.

Resources and publications mentioned in this conversation:

The Recovery House in Trieste: Rational, participants, intervention as the “work.” APA Psyc Net 2018

The Recovery House of Trieste. Journal of Recovery in Mental Health. 2018

Full article here.

Book that has had a great impact on Michele:

Tutto chiede salvezza (Italian)

Everything Calls for Salvation (English version)

And it is a Netflix series – with two seasons.

In this episode we sit down and talk with Caterina Vicentini in my hotel room in Trieste. Caterina is a math and physics teacher at the secondary school level in a town – Monfalcone -- that is about 30 minutes from the city centre of Trieste.

She is a service user and takes advantage of opportunities like this to share her story to help destigmatize mental illness and to offer hope that one can have a full life -- education, career and family –- even while encountering the challenges of a mental illness. Of course, she lives and works in a region that is known for exemplary care.

Her first crisis in her 20’s happened when she was a graduate student. At that time, she had been awarded an Erasmus Fellowship which allowed her to study in Belgium. Then she was offered an opportunity as a PhD student to be a teaching assistant.

She recalls for us her first experience of being taken to the hospital, forcibly injected by someone she did not trust, and then placed in a padded room with four point restraints. The shock of all that is beyond frightening and you will hear about her Houdini-like liberation that took all night long.

In 1991 she and her husband returned to Trieste and she shares the stories over the subsequent decades of a few more incidents that would set her back, and how she emerged stronger each time.

Note: when she talks about going to the “centro di salute mentale” or staying there in one of their beds, this is not a hospital. This is the community mental health center, which is an unlocked place with crisis beds for those who might need to stay for a day, a week or longer.

In this episode, we speak with Claudia Battison, a Psychiatric Rehabilitation Technician (PRT) in the mental health system in Trieste Italy. I am joined in this interview by Dr. Joy Agner, Assistant Professor at the USC Chan School of Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science at USC.

Heart Forward has become particularly interested in the potential role that occupational therapists -- if empowered to practice their profession to its full potential -- could play in mental health support settings in the U.S. Unfortunately, the way that OT services are primarily funded (through short-term, medically oriented reimbursement systems) constrain their ability to come alongside people in their recovery journey over the long term.

This topic was already approached in a Season Four podcast with Dr. Deborah Pitts from USC’s Chan School.

In this conversation, we learn about the ways in which the PRT engages with the system users. Three stark differences emerge:

• Time. There are no deadlines. They are afforded the time necessary to get to know the user and tease out the life plans/goals (also referred to as a personal rehabilitation project) that are meaningful to the user.
• Friendship. The relationship is described more like a friendship than what might be more typical in an American context. This equates with the ethos of coming alongside people in horizontal relationships that eschew the power dynamics associated with “professional” more verticalized relationships.
• Team. The PRT is part of a broader team – an équipe of other “operators” (their word for staff) – in the Community Mental Health Center. The other team members can help to weigh in on how to support the system user; the PRT is not left to his or her own devices.

And, or course, all of this is grounded in the belief that a mental health system must support a person in all three pillars of one’s life: casa, lavoro e socializazzione, or housing, work/purpose and community. The PRT must pay attention to each of these pillars to provide support for recovery.

As we have researched this further, it appears that this role if fairly unique to Italy and was created to augment the psycho-social support that is an underpinning to the Italian model. As described in one of the articles linked below, “Psychiatric rehabilitation technicians are trained to perform multidisciplinary rehabilitation and education interventions for people and their carers.”

Here are two articles about the role of the Psychiatric Research Technician.

Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Italy: Cinderella No More – The Contributions of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Technicians. Internation Journal of Mental Health. 2016

Who cares for it? How to provide psychosocial interventions in the community. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. 2012