Miranda speaks regularly on topics related to mental health, psychology, and trauma at events across North America.
Speaking Topics
What does recovery from mental illness look like?
“What are your recovery goals?” This question was posed to Miranda Newman shortly after her third stay in psychiatric intensive care. It was a question that was both simple and daunting. Unlike recovering from physical illness, mental health recovery is harder to conceptualize and rarely linear. Was recovery fewer panic attacks and thoughts of self-destruction? Longer periods between hospitalizations? The ability to return to full-time work?
In this talk, Newman explores the complex and often storied reality of mental health recovery. Informed by her lived experience recovering from borderline personality disorder, an often fatal mental illness typically viewed as untreatable, and her fellowship at Yale University’s program for recovery and community health, Newman examines the best and worst practices in community-based mental health treatment, unpacks social attitudes toward mental illness, and highlights gaps in policy. A talk rooted in hope, Newman reminds audiences that recovery isn’t the sole responsibility of the individual. It takes a village to help a person recover from mental illness.
finding strength in difference
At 11 years old, Miranda Newman pulled down her mother's medical dictionary, hoping to find a label that would explain why she was so "difficult." At 27, she finally got one: borderline personality disorder. But the relief never came. Instead, she discovered she'd been diagnosed with one of the most stigmatized mental illnesses in healthcare—a label so loaded that even her therapist recommended she avoid googling it.
In this talk, Newman explores what it means to live with multiple mental health labels—and what happens when you stop seeing them as pathology and start recognizing them as source of unique strength. Newman unpacks how the medical system labels and categorizes mental illness, often in ways that create barriers rather than pathways to wellness. But, she also reveals how the very symptoms that made her “difficult” or “unstable” by clinical standards, also make her creative, deeply empathetic, and capable of profound connection.
Drawing from her essay collection Rough Magic and her lived experience, Newman explores how we can rewrite the narrative around mental illness—not by denying pain, but by acknowledging the unexpected strengths that live alongside it. Finding Strength in Difference is a talk about determination, resilience, and the radical act of seeing yourself as whole instead of broken.
Miranda also speaks about borderline personality disorder, overcoming trauma, and more. She tailors her talks to ensure they’re appropriate for a wide range of audiences.
If you’d like to book Miranda as a speaker, please contact Rob Firing, Transatlantic Literary Agency.