What if the biggest challenges in behavioral health aren’t due to lack of effort—but how systems are designed?

In this episode, we sit down with Isamu Pant, author of The Behavioral Health Fix, to explore a practical and refreshingly honest approach to improving care, staff satisfaction, and operations—without waiting for more resources.

Drawing from experience in community behavioral health and scaling systems in high-performance environments, Isamu introduces the Find-Fix-Serve framework—a simple but powerful method to help organizations move from reactive problem-solving to intentional, sustainable change.

This conversation challenges a typical reaction of “checking boxes” and instead invites leaders, clinicians, and teams to ask a more powerful question: Where do we actually want to be—and what’s the smallest step to get there?

We also explore:

• Why behavioral health systems stay stuck in the same problems
• How to identify high-impact “levers” for change
• The role of human connection in an AI-driven future
• And how reframing challenges can restore agency across all levels of care

Whether you’re on the frontlines or in leadership, this episode offers a clear path forward—grounded in reality and built for action.

About the Guest:

Isamu Pant is the founder of Behavioral Health Fix and author of The Behavioral Health Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Better Care, Happier Staff, and Smoother Operations. He works directly with behavioral health and IDD executives to fix long‑standing operational problems and grow without burning out staff or putting care at risk, often in focused 30‑day sprints.

Before launching Behavioral Health Fix, Isamu built the first analytics department and led organization-wide strategic initiatives in a 500‑person community behavioral health center, and later helped Amazon Web Services stand up and scale a new cybersecurity and early AI services organization. He now brings that combination back to the field to help leaders build the operational foundations, governance, and workflows that support better care and staff well‑being – and to layer AI on top of those foundations in ways that actually help, rather than chase tools for their own sake.

Recent appearances include the opening keynote at the Behavioral Health AI Summit and the Behavioral Health Business “Perspectives” podcast on the field’s first AI‑related labor action.

Links:

• Contact: media@behavioralhealthfix.com
• Amazon link: https://a.co/d/0gtbUpmi
• Website: https://www.behavioralhealthfix.com/

Support the show

Thank you for listening to this episode of Talking Addiction & Recovery Podcast.

To learn more about the podcast visit www.andrewjschreier.com

To inquire being a guest on the podcast or sponsorship opportunities you can e-mail talkingaddictionandrecovery@gmail.com

Talking Addiction & Recovery Podcast is the follow-up to the book "Addiction & Recovery" by author and clinician Andrew J. Schreier. This podcast explores discussions regarding important issues related to addiction and recovery. Information you learn here is not typical of what you will find in academic textbooks and resources; and comes from the experiences of a clinical supervisor, clinical substance abuse counselor, and licensed professional counselor and the work with individuals and others involved in this field. Listen as guests join the show and cover a wide range of topics looking to educate individuals, families, communities, organizations, institutions, mental health professionals, educators, and anyone else impacted by addiction and recovery. Content is not intended to be treatment and is not affiliated with any specific group.

What role can movies play in addiction recovery?

In this episode, Ted Perkins—author of Addicted in Film: Movies We Love About Habits We Hate and creator of Recovery Movie Meetups—joins the podcast to discuss how film can become a meaningful tool for healing, reflection, and recovery engagement.

Drawing from a background in Hollywood as both a studio executive and screenwriter, Ted shares how his own recovery journey inspired him to watch 100 films focused on addiction and recovery over 100 days. That experience eventually evolved into a book, discussion guides, and a growing program now being used in treatment settings around the world.

This conversation explores:

• How movies help people process addiction and recovery
• The balance between realism and glorification in film
• Recovery as a heroic transformation story
• Why storytelling creates emotional connection and insight
• How Recovery Movie Meetups became a structured clinical intervention
• The future of AI-generated storytelling in treatment and recovery spaces

From classic films to emerging technology, this episode examines how storytelling continues to shape the way people understand addiction, mental health, and recovery.

About the Guest

Ted Perkins is the CEO and founder of Recovery Movie Meetups, an innovative program that transforms Hollywood films into structured, clinically meaningful mutual support experiences for addiction and mental health treatment. A longtime Hollywood screenwriter and media executive, his work bridges storytelling and behavioral health, using film to spark insight, emotional engagement, and lasting change.

Perkins created Recovery Movie Meetups out of his own lived experience with alcohol use disorder, depression, and the psychological toll of constant “what-if” thinking—both personally and professionally as a writer. Drawing on the principles of cinematherapy, he developed a model that uses carefully curated films to help individuals explore addiction, mental health challenges, and recovery in a more accessible and less confrontational way.

His program is now used in hundreds of treatment centers, recovery community organizations, sober homes, schools, and correctional settings across the United States and Canada. By combining film with guided discussion and structured workbooks, Perkins has created a scalable approach that helps participants identify with characters, examine their own behaviors, and engage more deeply in the recovery process.

He is also the author of Addicted in Film: Movies We Love About the Habits We Hate, and continues to advance the use of narrative and visual storytelling as powerful tools for self-reflection, connection, and transformation in behavioral health.

Links:

• www.recoverymoviemeetups.com

Support the show

Thank you for listening to this episode of Talking Addiction & Recovery Podcast.

To learn more about the podcast visit www.andrewjschreier.com

To inquire being a guest on the podcast or sponsorship opportunities you can e-mail talkingaddictionandrecovery@gmail.com

Talking Addiction & Recovery Podcast is the follow-up to the book "Addiction & Recovery" by author and clinician Andrew J. Schreier. This podcast explores discussions regarding important issues related to addiction and recovery. Information you learn here is not typical of what you will find in academic textbooks and resources; and comes from the experiences of a clinical supervisor, clinical substance abuse counselor, and licensed professional counselor and the work with individuals and others involved in this field. Listen as guests join the show and cover a wide range of topics looking to educate individuals, families, communities, organizations, institutions, mental health professionals, educators, and anyone else impacted by addiction and recovery. Content is not intended to be treatment and is not affiliated with any specific group.