27: Making Self-Help Resources Accessible to All | Diana Partington of the Book, DBT for Life
Release Date: 07/04/2024
Ep 50: When Child Care Can't Wait for Nine to Five with Sara Bradley
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Sara Bradley, Executive Director of York Day Early Learning in York, Pennsylvania, about a problem most people in the mental health field have never thought about — and that affects millions of the patients they see every day. The American child care system was built around a standard workday. For the nearly 20 percent of workers who work nonstandard hours — overnight shift workers, first responders, healthcare workers, contract workers, and others — that system simply does not work. York Day is one of the very few organizations in the country trying to change that....
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Ep 49: What Happens When You Replace the Fax Machine with Shana Palmieri
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Shana Palmieri, Chief Clinical Officer and co-founder of XFERALL (pronounced Transfer-all) , a real-time patient transfer and care coordination platform that is replacing one of the most broken processes in behavioral health — the psychiatric placement referral. Shana spent years as the Director of Behavioral Health Services at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she watched something that would change the direction of her career. Patients in psychiatric crisis sitting in overwhelmed emergency departments for hours, sometimes days, while...
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Ep 48: Everybody's Talking About Mental Health But Nobody's Funding It with Stephanie Slowly Little
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Stephanie Slowly Little, Executive Director of NAMI Maryland, about the state of mental health care access in Maryland, the funding landscape facing nonprofit behavioral health organizations, and what it actually takes to keep showing up for communities when every turn is making it harder. NAMI Maryland represents over 60,000 advocates, people living with mental illness, and supporters across the state. Stephanie, a licensed clinical social worker and public health executive with more than 17 years of experience, stepped into the Executive Director role in October...
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EP 47: What the Research Actually Shows About AI Therapy with Dr. Nick Jacobson
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Dr. Nick Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science, psychiatry, and computer science at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and director of the AIM HIGH Laboratory, about the first clinical trial of a fully generative AI therapy chatbot — and what the results actually show. The access crisis in mental health care is the starting point for understanding why Dr. Jacobson's team built Therabot. In the most well-resourced mental health settings in the United States, there are approximately 35 providers per 100,000 people. In any given year, roughly one in...
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Ep 46: The Crisis Text Line with Dr. Shairi Turner
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Dr. Shairi Turner, Chief Health Officer at Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 text-based mental health support and crisis intervention through a community of trained volunteer counselors. In 2025, Crisis Text Line had more conversations than any year since its founding — over 1.5 million — and the data from those conversations tells a story that every clinician and practice owner needs to hear. Dr. Turner walks Rachel through how Crisis Text Line actually works: what happens from the moment someone texts HOME to 741741, how volunteer counselors...
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Ep 45: Stop Doing What Worked Ten Years Ago with Dr. Elizabeth Carr
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Dr. Elizabeth Carr, a clinical psychologist and the founder and CEO of Kentlands Psychotherapy in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Elizabeth leads a team of 20 doctoral and master's-level clinicians and has spent over two decades building a community-focused, financially sustainable practice through some of the most disruptive periods in the history of mental health care. A former Navy psychologist and sought-after speaker on practice management, she recently published a piece on strategic positioning during industry upheaval that is the centerpiece of this conversation. The mental...
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Ep 44: They Knew and They Profited Anyway with Matthew Bergman
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel speaks with Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, about the landmark KGM verdict — the first social media addiction case in the United States to reach a jury. In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and awarded $6 million in damages to a young woman whose mental health was seriously harmed by her use of Instagram and YouTube beginning at age six. Matthew has spent four years building the legal case that made this moment possible, and the theory at its center is straightforward: this was...
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Ep 43: When Payers Own the Data: What the CAQH Rebrand Means for Providers
The Mental Health Evolution
In this solo episode, Rachel Harrison takes a break from her usual guest conversations to address something that has been generating a lot of discussion in the mental health community this week: the rebranding of CAQH as DataSpring. If you have been in mental health practice for any amount of time, you know CAQH. It is the credentialing portal most clinicians and practice owners have relied on for years to maintain licensing, training history, liability insurance, and practice information for insurance credentialing — a system designed so that providers enter their data once and it flows...
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Ep 42: What Clinicians Need to Know About AI Law with Dr. Nick Shumate
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel Harrison speaks with Dr. Nick Shumate, a psychiatrist at the Division of Digital Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, whose background is as rare as it is relevant: before medicine, he was a regulatory attorney practicing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That combination of clinical training and legal expertise is exactly what drove him to lead a sweeping 50-state review of how the United States is governing artificial intelligence in mental health — research that produced findings every clinician and practice owner needs to...
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Ep 41: The Coverage Gap Is a Policy Problem with Cara Cheevers
The Mental Health Evolution
Rachel Harrison speaks with Cara Cheevers, Vice President of Coverage Policy at Inseparable, a national mental health advocacy organization working to win better mental health care for everyone in this country. Cara brings more than fifteen years of experience in health equity advocacy, including leading Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act enforcement at the Colorado Division of Insurance. In this conversation, Cara and Rachel dig into something that sits at the heart of the mental health access crisis: the workforce shortage is not simply a supply problem — it is a policy problem....
info_outlineDiana Partington, author of DBT for Life, discusses her lifelong struggles with suicidality, the transformative impact of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and how it provided her with practical tools to manage overwhelming emotions and crises. She elaborates on her innovative approach to making DBT skills accessible through her self-help book, which includes colorful illustrations and short stories to cater to various learning styles. She also touches on the origins of DBT, its broader applications beyond clinical settings, and the importance of inclusivity in learning.
About Diana Partington:
Diana is a licensed professional counselor and author of DBT for Life: Skills to transform the way you live. She offers online DBT skills classes, webinars and trainings for clients and clinicians across North America. She wrote her master’s thesis at Vanderbilt on effective teaching of DBT skills for different learning styles. Her passion is making DBT skills accessible for everyone.
instagram.com/sufferingoptional
linkedin.com/in/diana-partington-93552484/
Psychology Today Column: psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dbt-for-daily-life
Episode Timestamps:
- (01:40) Dialectical behavioral therapy: what it is and how it helps
- (06:00) Rethinking self-help books with visuals and easy navigation
- (09:45) Making DBT accessible through books, webinars, and podcasts
- (12:05) Kaizen method; tiptoeing around the amygdala
- (17:00) DBT and the Dharma
- (19:30) Mastery of radical acceptance
- (23:50) The importance of inclusivity in mental health
Watch this episode on YouTube:
youtube.com/@TheMentalHealthEntrepreneurPod
Connect with Rachel:
Facebook Group: The Mental Health Entrepreneur
Website: traumaspecialiststraining.com
Instagram: instagram.com/trauma_specialist
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rachel-harrison-81a4796