MadFreedom Advocates Staff
Chris Nial
CEO of MadFreedom Advocates
Chris Nial was the team lead for Pathways Vermont’s Community Center and Statewide Warmline until taking on his new role for MadFreedom Advocates. He serves as the co-chair to the board of Alyssum, and has been working in mental health peer support for the past 4 years following his own experience with a mental health crisis and extreme state. He is incredibly passionate about making more spaces for alternative approaches to mental health outside of the traditional medical model, and promoting the voices and choices of psychiatric survivors, ex-patients, consumers, and mad folks.
He particularly believes strongly in people’s capacity to support one another, believing in people’s lived experiences, and reducing the harms caused by psychiatric systems and dominant narratives about mental health.
Neilah Rovinsky
Advocacy and Education Coordinator
Neilah Rovinsky is a psychiatric survivor and a passionate advocate for systemic change and mad liberation. After spending over two years in an involuntary abusive residential facility from ages 16-18, Neilah emerged with a determination to challenge and transform systems of harm.
As a former Project Manager at UnSilenced, she helped organize a lobbying trip to Washington, DC to advocate for the Stop Institional Child Abuse Act (SICAA) and led campaigns to raise awareness of the harms of seclusion, restraint and coercive control. With three years of experience as an early childhood educator at the Greater Burlington YMCA, Neilah emphasizes a relationship-centered approach, fostering autonomy, choice, and respect for youth.
Her commitment to liberation for all and ending all carceral systems extends to FreeHer VT, where she has volunteered to support legislation to halt new prison construction in Essex. Neilah has also interned with AsylumWorks in DC, helping asylum seekers share their stories to drive asylum policy reform.
In her new role at MadFreedom Advocates, Neilah is dedicated to advancing the rights of individuals labeled as mentally ill, with a focus on achieving meaningful policy changes, advocacy initiatives, and training programs that amplify marginalized voices and effectively represent the lived experiences and goals of our community.
Esmé Knoke
Patient Representative - Chittenden County
Esmé Knoke (she/he/they) is a firm believer in amplifying the voices of and trusting the expertise of those with lived experience of marginalization.
As a former medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, he has supported people seeking care outside of traditional medical institutions as a result of access issues, stigma and discrimination, and traumatic experiences. He has seen first-hand the harmful impact left by ‘healthcare’ that does not promote agency, autonomy, and self-determination. Esmé believes in affirming, empowering, relationship-centered support that dehierarchizes the helper/helpee binary.
As a birth doula, they advocate for birthing people’s voices to be heard and their wishes respected. In this work, they also practice holding space for intense experience and providing companionship on an individual’s self-determined journey. They will continue to cultivate this way of supporting others in their work at MFA.
Through her own mental health challenges, Esmé has experience with many of the community resources she is now partnering with in her new role at MadFreedom Advocates. As the Patient Representative for Chittenden County, she is committed to fighting discrimination against the mad community in her work supporting the self-advocacy of involuntarily hospitalized individuals, bolstering knowledge of their rights, and connecting them to alternative community resources. It is heartwarming for her to be part of a team of passionate people reimagining mental health support and offering the advocacy she herself needed.
Ada Johnson
Patient Representative - Southern Vermont
Ada Johnson (she/her) is a southern queer gender fluid woman who is committed to collective liberation, ancestral healing and the knowing that comes with being present with generational and present grief and trauma.
Ada has offered community health education, birth work, abortion support, and public health work for the last twenty-five years, attending births as a trauma-informed community midwife and full-spectrum doula. She is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner who specializes in working with pregnancy, pregnancy loss and postpartum and works with all people ready to be present with their grief and trauma. She also trains birth professionals on best practices to support parents after loss.
Ada is excited to be part of MFA’s vision of ending discrimination for psychiatric survivors, mad folks, and others marginalized by the mental health system. As a Patient Representative for Southern Vermont, Ada is excited to support the self-advocacy of involuntarily hospitalized folks while helping them to connect with resources and community outside of the institution. She is fortunate to be part of communities that do not pathologize or demonize madness but learn together how to hold and support one another. She has learned in community that her extreme states do not make her less and often allow her access to more.
Eric Laufe
Patient Representative - Washington County
Eric Laufe is a psychiatric survivor and a passionate advocate for systemic change and mad liberation. He cares greatly about finding new and helpful alternative approaches to mental health outside of the traditional medical model, and for promoting the voices of psychiatric survivors, ex-patients, consumers, and mad folks.
Eric has a masters degree in social work and two-thirds of a masters degree in contemplative psychotherapy. He was medicated for a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder at age 26, spending the next 33 years on various psychiatric medications, including a cocktail of SSRI’s, mood stabilizers, benzodiazepines, and atypical antipsychotics, none of which ever fixed anything. In 2020, during Covid, and after two short, voluntary hospitalizations and a few dozen electro-convulsive (ECT) shock treatments for depression, Eric decided to see what life is like without psych meds. He successfully tapered off all psychiatric medications over a five month period (way too rapidly!) by the end of 2020. In the process, Eric sustained a serious neurological injury that he is now slowly recovering from.
Eric has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for over 40 years. Combining his training in mindfulness meditation and Buddhist teachings on wisdom and compassion with his academic training in social work and psychology, as well as his three plus decades as a person with lived experience of the psychiatric system, Eric believes that he has some helpful tools to offer others in the system and coming out of the system.
When he is not doing patient advocacy work, Eric enjoys hanging out with his cat Maya, meditating, reading, dreaming about hiking in national parks, visiting with friends, cooking simple, delicious recipes, and resting his overwrought nervous system. He is deeply inspired by the mission and mandate of MadFreedom Advocates, and loves working with a staff of people who all feel as passionately, if not more so, about mad liberation.
Emma Munson-Blatt
Patient Representative - Southern Vermont
Emma Munson-Blatt (they/them) is a sexual assault and psychiatric survivor who believes understanding intersectionality is a key component of restorative justice. They are informed by lived experiences coping with extreme mental states and self-liberating from addictive substances. Emma is passionate about supporting peers who face stigmatization and marginalization within mental health “care” institutions and systems.
Emma’s advocacy work has included fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights, immigrant rights, antiwar policies, environmental justice, and abolition of the prison-industrial complex through nonviolent direct action. They have organized with the national group Climate Defiance and Mass Action Against Police Brutality, a Boston-based organization that supported families who lost loved ones to police violence and experienced police brutality. Emma is pursuing an associates degree in human services at Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts.
In their free time, Emma enjoys thrifting, spending time with family and pets, reading, writing, collecting rocks, and always (no matter what time of year!) preparing for Halloween.