Imadé (ee-MAH-day) is a writer and mental health advocate who founded Depressed While Black. She is a suicide attempt survivor who lives with clinical depression and borderline personality disorder. Imadé first developed Depressed While Black as her 2015 Columbia University Non-Fiction Creative Writing MFA thesis. Depressed While Black has grown into an online community, an in-progress book, and a nonprofit that donates Black-affirming personal care items to mental hospital patients.

Dr. Reyes-Santos is a professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon, founder of the ceremonial space Ilé Estrella de los Mares, and an equity and inclusion consultant. She is the author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her manuscript-in-progress, Oceanic Whispers, Secrets She Never Told, intervenes in conversations about restorative justice and community healing through a Black Caribbean epistemological lens. Her ongoing research project with Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, titled Decolonizing Knowledge: AfroIndigenous Caribbean Women Healers, will showcase healers and their ethnobotanical resources through an open-access digital archive.

Dr. Swarbrick has published and lectured around the county and internationally on employment, wellness, peer support, and recovery. Her work has focused on a strength-based 8-dimensional wellness model to promote recovery from mental health and substance use conditions. She is well known for collaborating with the peer community and family groups to identify and address social determinants that present barriers to recovery, such as homelessness, poverty and under/unemployment. Peggy has developed many peer support certification courses, a peer health navigator training and peer wellness coaching practice model. She has created health promotion initiatives and has created wellness self-care programs for caregiver’s families and youth. She has made significant contributions to the body of literature in occupational therapy, nursing and community behavioral health care practice.

Frank King, Suicide Prevention Speaker and Trainer was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years. Depression and suicide run in his family. He’s thought about killing himself more times than he can count. He’s fought a lifetime battle with Major Depressive Disorder and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into five TEDx Talks and sharing his lifesaving insights on Mental Health Awareness with associations, corporations, and colleges. A Motivational Public Speaker who uses his life lessons to start the conversation giving people permission to give voice to their feelings and experiences surrounding depression and suicide. And doing it by coming out, as it were, and standing in his truth, and doing it with humor. He believes that where there is humor there is hope, where there is laughter there is life, nobody dies laughing. The right person, at the right time, with the right information, can save a life.