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Clients experiencing both mental health challenges and substance use are often described through harmful narratives that reduce complex life experiences to labels such as noncompliant, manipulative, treatment resistant, or beyond help. These characterizations can obscure important context, reinforce stigma, and influence how judges and other decision-makers understand a client’s behavior, needs, and capacity for change.

Join Advancing Real Change for a webinar examining the relationship between mental illness and substance use and its importance to mitigation and criminal defense advocacy. Participants will consider how co-occurring mental health and substance use concerns may appear throughout a client’s records, treatment history, relationships, and involvement with the criminal legal system.

This interactive session will offer strategies for identifying and challenging stigmatizing language, placing difficult behavior within the fuller context of a client’s life, and developing narratives that recognize resilience, barriers to care, and the need for meaningful treatment and support. Participants will also explore how defense teams can communicate these issues with greater accuracy, care, and persuasiveness when advocating before judges and other decision-makers.

Speaker’s Bio:

Holly Hagle, Ph.D., a driving force in addiction health services education and research for more than two decades, serves as the Chief Learning and Research Officer at the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. She is also affiliated faculty at the University of Missouri’s Department of Psychological Sciences and the Missouri Center for Addiction Research and Engagement (MoCARE), where her work explores the critical intersection of applied research and education in treatment, recovery, and prevention.