Maggie Flynn (EL-OTD ‘20) will co-present the keynote address at next month’s AOTA Mental Health Specialty Conference in Chicago. Flynn and her colleague/mentor, Jane Musgrave, will present, “Ridding the World of Mental Health OT Ignorance.” The presentation will focus on how they believe occupational therapists have a responsibility to support one another, and other disciplines, in improving the awareness, understanding, and value of the profession within the mental health setting, as well as enhance program development and influence positive culture change.

Flynn is the Director of Inpatient Group Therapy at an inpatient psychiatric hospital in MA and Musgrave is a national OT consultant. The duo had presented at the 2024 AOTA INSPIRE conference in Orlando, FL and applied for the October’s AOTA specialty conference. Their address is an expansion of the mentorship and program development work they have done together over the last four years, with an emphasis on the challenges OTs encounter in psychiatric and behavioral health settings, and on understanding what mental health OT is.

“Being asked to give this keynote address is kind of surreal,” said Flynn. “I am just incredibly grateful to be given the opportunity to share with Jane in these trials, tribulations, and successes and that people are actually interested in listening and sharing in these experiences with us as well.

“The OTD program at the MGH Institute not only provided me the education to be a ‘good treating OT clinician,’ but I was taught how to be an advocate, an innovator, a collaborator, an agent for change, and a believer in mental health occupational therapy. It is through the experiences at MGH IHP that I felt - not necessarily prepared for everything - but willing to take on anything. That’s translated into the work that Jane Musgrave and I are doing.”

AOTA Mental Health Specialty Conference will take place on October 25-26, 2024.