the newsletter
Moral Health
Moral health is what lets you stay whole inside systems that are not.
It asks you to keep faith with a future still becoming. It asks what you would build instead, and trusts that friendship is how we get there.
Moral Health is a field journal from inside the helping systems that shape our lives. I’m Michelle Bernabe, a psychiatric nurse, and I write about how people stay whole inside institutions that don’t—and how we might build systems capable of truly holding us. Moving across self, community, and society, Moral Health brings narrative medicine, moral imagination, frontline experience, and systems design into the same conversation. It is both a witness to what is breaking and a love letter to what we could build together.
Taking the expanse of the imagination seriously, with discipline and rigor.
Free to read and free to subscribe.
All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
faith, imagination, friendship
Keep faith with a future still becoming.
Ask what you would build instead.
Trust that friendship is how we get there.
start here
- the day a celebrity threw a phone at my head, opens in a new tabi thought he was the one out of control. ten years later, i realize he was the only one sane enough to scream.
- the great psych ward sandwich heist (27, to be exact), opens in a new tabnotes on the infinite game in american healthcare
- Compassion Doesn’t Fatigue, Systems Do, opens in a new tabwhy “compassion fatigue” and “burnout” is getting it wrong
- The Love Gap: How Healthcare Lost Its Heart and How We Can Get It Back, opens in a new tabif love is the measure, what have we built?
- the right to feel good in healthcare, opens in a new taba blueprint for a healthcare system that is full of surprise and wonder