• therapy THAT REsists locating the problem solely inside the individual or reinforcing the very conditions people are struggling to survive.

• Training & Community for like-minded clinicians.

• Programs that meet community defined needs.

• Service that prioritizes ethical and equitable treatment, with dignity as a guide.

What We’re All About…

Axis Mundi Center for Mental Health is an attempt to answer a call.

We live and practice in a time of social strain, division, collapse, and fracture. Therapy that ignores this does not serve clients well. Axis exists to offer a practice of counseling that meets people where they are living and to train clinicians capable of doing the same. Our commitment is not only to the clients we serve, but to the careful formation of clinicians who can meet this moment with humility, skill, and responsibility. We commit to doing this work radically and rigorously, we remain accountable to clients and to each other, and we aspire to stop protecting approaches that no longer serve.

Axis Mundi is a sanctuary for clinicians who refuse to accept forms of therapy that are shaped more by convenience and by systems protecting themselves, than by real care. We opened our doors in 2016 as a small group of clinicians frustrated by and unwilling to contribute to models of practice that asked clients—or clinicians—to ignore the realities of their lives. We formed Axis in response, with the conviction that therapy can be practiced with greater honesty, depth, collective care and social responsibility.

Axis was built to examine itself and the field, revise its methods, and respond to what the work requires rather than what feels comfortable.

The Fit: At Axis, rightness-of-fit is not a preference. It is a responsibility. That’s our focus and our guide, at all levels of the organization. That means things are a little different over here! For example:

• Our consultations and intakes assess the overall best fit for the client - that might mean the therapist in the consultation, it might mean someone else in the agency, it might mean someone at another organization. We’re dedicated to applying our network of information to ultimate client well-being.

• We also trust that staff are more fit to certain needs and roles than others, and this is something that can change often and over time. AM work culture norms are about role fluidity, creative resource applications, and wise response…not about fixed expectations and identities.

• Culturally, we believe that those who are here now are those who are fits for the times.

History and Context:

Responsibility without action is insufficient.

Axis Mundi Center for Mental Health practices within a national and local history that did not begin with the institutions we now inhabit. The land on which our offices operate carries histories of displacement and dispossession that remain present rather than resolved.

Our central offices are located in what is now known as Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville, Albany, and San Francisco—on the unceded territories of the Lisjan Ohlone people, including the Chochenyo and Ramaytush communities.

We understand this history as an ongoing responsibility, not a symbolic statement. Practicing responsibly requires acknowledging how past and present harms shape current conditions, and refusing to treat those conditions as abstract or irrelevant. This awareness informs how we think about care, accountability, and repair.

Practice, Power, and Responsibility:

Ethical therapy requires more than good intentions. It requires structures that do not reproduce harm.

The mental health field has not been neutral in its development or application. Historically, it has defined wellness, illness, and disorder in ways that reflected prevailing power structures, rewarded conformity, and pathologized responses to harm rather than the conditions producing it.

Axis takes this history seriously. We understand that when therapy locates distress solely within the individual, it risks functioning as a system of regulation rather than care. Our work is grounded in the responsibility to distinguish between personal suffering and the effects of unequal, coercive, or harmful conditions, and to refuse clinical approaches that collapse that distinction. We are invested in a movement toward collective freedom and healing, in which actions furthering systemic change are a necessary part of mental health work.

We are committed to forms of therapy that do not treat survival as evidence of defect, nor adaptation to harm as pathology. Mental health work, as we practice it, includes attention to the broader conditions shaping well-being and a refusal to reduce complex human responses to individual failure.

This responsibility extends beyond individual clinical encounters to the formation of clinicians themselves. Axis prioritizes ongoing learning, accountability, and structural reflection in how clinicians are trained, supervised, and supported, recognizing that ethical practice requires continual examination of how power operates within care.

This work is ongoing and never done. When dominant systems define distress as individual failure, they conceal their own role in producing harm. We aren’t down with that.

Axis understands ethical mental health care as a continuous process of learning, reflection, and action. We are committed to examining how harm is reproduced within care, revising our practices accordingly, and building structures that better support the people we serve. This responsibility shapes both our clinical work and how we train, hire, and support clinicians. To this end, we:

• stand unequivocally against any racialized or ethnically-targeted harm that has well-documented impacts on mental health outcomes.

• explore creative options for increased accessibility and equity in our therapeutic services

• approach hiring and supervision with attention to representation

• hold a curious but accountable space for discussions about historical intergenerational trauma, and/or conditions that consistently advantage some while constraining others

• provide training and supervision that help clinicians examine how power and authority operate in care and reduce the risk of harm in therapeutic relationships