Kate Speer is the teammate of her two service dogs, Doctor Waffle and Tugboat. She is also a writer, TEDx speaker, mental health advocate, and strategist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Determined to democratize access to mental healthcare and destigmatize serious mental illness, she runs public health campaigns by day and writes Substack bestseller – The Healing Lab (https://www.the-healing-lab.com/) – by night. Although you wouldn’t know it now, eleven years ago, after Kate survived a suicide attempt and a decade of intermittent psychosis, her doctors told her she would only survive in a residential psychiatric ward. But then, Kate got Waffle, and together, they rebuilt her entire life and proved those doctors spectacularly wrong. Today, in honor of her unexpected freedom and in service of her peers and younger self, she story tells unabashedly about life with serious mental illness and the power of radical self-acceptance, adventure, and dogs as medicine in recovery and healing.
Follow their adventure on SUBSTACK
“ My dogs are my freedom — my freedom to adventure, explore and grow into a life a defined by agency instead of limitation. My dogs are undoubtedly my greatest gift. They are my doctors and medicine, my teachers and healers and above all, my best friends as they champion the greatest truths we will ever get to know: the little things are the big things. Here and now is all we have. Being together is the greatest gift of all. And even on the hard days — it is always time for an adventure, no matter the weather of the world or my very own mind. ”
-Kate