While individual factors remain important, research increasingly shows that relationships and the way we philosophically think about relationships play crucial roles in individual suffering and healing. The Center for Integrative Relational Health (IRH) aspires to enhance and re-imagine existing philosophies, thinking, and clinical and social understandings and approaches to human relating. Our work and play is in exploring how human experience unfolds and emerges through deeper connections with ourselves, others, culture, and the environment.

This solutions-based shifting paradigm perspective invites all of us to expand clinical practice in exciting ways. In collaboration and community, we hope to engage more field-specific questions and transdisciplinary conversations regarding the relationship between mental health and culture. While maintaining the benefits of established approaches, we maintain the necessity for deeper awareness regarding how healing emerges through relationship and context. This creates opportunities for more comprehensive approaches that honor the complexity of individual experience that is rooted in our fundamental interconnectedness, interdependence, and culture. These no doubt are new possibilities for supporting individual and collective psychological health and cultural vitality.