What’s the part of your story you’re afraid to tell?

Everyone has a story, but stigma may prevent us from speaking our truths. How would peers react to a diagnosis? (Kindly!) Is taking medication a weakness? (Of course not.) Mental health is complex, nuanced, and highly personalized. Speaker Amanda Lipp will share her strategy for individualized navigation through serious mental illness and encourage you to speak your truth without fear.

Amanda is a social entrepreneur and filmmaker passionate about mental health storytelling and systems innovation. She talks about her struggles with mental illness and hospitalization during college to recovery and becoming a leader in mental health. She emphasizes the role of art in her recovery and finding her voice as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Amanda will showcase her avenues for advocacy, from building a startup to fundraise for mental health to documentary filmmaking around the world about youth schizophrenia and psychosis. A counselor from CPS will be available.

Following Amanda’s speech and a short Q&A session, join Letters to Strangers for an artistic, letter-writing workshop where we explore the importance of artistic expression and our layers of identity in recovery and wellbeing.

Amanda Lipp, 27, works at the intersection of mental health, filmmaking, and tech-philanthropy. She is Founder and CEO of The Giving Gallery, Director & Filmmaker of Lipp Studios, and Specialist for the Center for Applied Research Solutions (CARS). Amanda is the youngest board director of the largest grassroots mental health nonprofit in the U.S., the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and serves on the advisory board of Technology Adolescent Mental Wellness, a research initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has given over 150 speeches locally and globally, and has made over 20 short films about youth psychosis and schizophrenia.