I am trying to make an impact in society in a few different ways. I am sharing about them here to be intentional about my theory of change and to recognize that journeys towards social impact often involve road bumps and require long-term investment, diligence, and adaptability.
Building an Evidence Base and Advocating for Health Policy:
While some may feel that writing another research paper is a waste of time and resources, I think research can contribute to evidence-based policy when it is targeted to the right policymakers, published in the right places, and accompanied by advocacy and media coverage. I strive to choose projects based on whether they address health policy questions and if I think new evidence could move the needle. I recognize that I am just one researcher, but I believe that scientists can collectively build a body of evidence that influences health policy, even in the face of powerful political and financial interests.
Through my research and advocacy, I aim to build an evidence base for and directly advance health policy that: (a) shifts power and decision-making in healthcare to disabled people, (b) divests from the mental health industrial complex, psychiatrization, and the prison industrial complex, (c) addresses the upstream social, political, and structural determinants of health that shape health across the life course, and (d) moves the United States closer toward a universal government-funded and coordinated health care system. I believe that health care is a human right and that health systems with the best and most equitable health outcomes are government-run. Through my peer-reviewed scholarship, I specifically seek to influence clinicians and health policymakers. For this reason, I primarily strive to publish quantitative research on ableism in open-access, high-impact medical, health services, and public health peer-reviewed journals to reach this audience and maximize my impact. Read my published work.
Intervening on Ableism in Health Care and Public Health:
Through my research and advocacy, I seek to document and intervene on discrimination in health care settings. I also strive to address ableism within public health and healthcare metrics, workforce training, employment, and leadership. I understand ableism as an institutional, structural, and systemic force that operates alongside other systems of oppression such as racism, transphobia, colonialism, and capitalism. Internalized and interpersonal ableism are symptoms of institutional, structural, and systemic ableism, which I believe should be our primary point of critique and intervention. In addition to my peer-reviewed articles, I also publish independent work. My independent research briefs are published open-access on my platform Ableism & Healthcare Now and via a pre-print server to reach a range of audiences such as other researchers in the health sciences and disability studies and disability justice scholars. Read my research briefs.
Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund:
The Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund is dedicated to supporting initiatives advancing disability justice, mad liberation, trans liberation, sex worker justice, abolition of prisons and policing, regenerative craft, the creative economy, and efforts to dismantle and reduce harm from systems of ableism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. The fund seeks to redistribute more than 10% of my annual income ($10,000 to $25,000 in funds) from my work as a public health writer and data analyst as Dielle Lundberg and as a multi-media artist as Lyra McMahon to frontline response, projects, organizations, causes, and organizing efforts. Read more.
Providing Research Services and Offering a Critical Perspective:
I earn most of my income by providing data analysis and writing services for a range of population health research projects, typically as a part-time employee, contractor, or consultant. I value opportunities to collaborate on projects outside my main research focus and even when I do not fully share the underlying assumptions or approach. I find that I often have the most impact on a project (and learn the most) when I’m working with teams whose perspectives differ in some ways from my own. Occasionally, I do co-author or contribute to work that does not entirely align with my own theoretical positions. In these cases, I recognize this work will occur with or without me, and I participate because I believe my involvement can help the team consider new directions and move the project toward greater alignment with equity-focused and critical perspectives. I use a portion of proceeds from this work to support my work on other initiatives, such as my research on structural ableism and my redistribution through the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund. View my publications.
Economic Inclusion of Disabled People in the Creative Economy:
In 2017, I co-founded Make Fashion Clean (MFC Tie-Dye), a non-profit initiative that has worked for more than a decade to reduce global fashion pollution through an upcycling partnership with artisans affected by disability/ableism at the Matilda Flow Inclusion Foundation in Ghana. This project emerged out of two years I spent living and developing relationships in Ghana, and I lived on-site while Matilda Lartey founded the Foundation in 2016. Since 2017, MFC has redistributed more than $220,000 to the Foundation to support their upcycling studio that employs eight or more artisans whose work has been displaced by fast fashion and the secondhand clothing trade. MFC is working toward a vision of long-term project sustainability, governed and operated by the Ghanaian team, with the dissolution of MFC by 2027 or 2028. I am currently supporting this transition as a board member and am seeking community support for the project via the Make Fashion Clean Impact Fund. Learn more about the fund.
Making Art as a Disabled, Transfeminine Person in Recovery:
Before anything else, I am a human with a rich and messy lived experience, trying to make sense out of my existence. As an alcoholic in recovery and a survivor of psychiatric harm, gender-based violence, and sexual harm, I am deeply passionate about noncarceral approaches to harm prevention and resolution. I also write openly about stigmatized topics, from psychiatric violence and addiction to sexuality and online sex work, and give space for the human complexity in everyone, even those who have caused significant harm. As a multi-media artist and novelist practicing as Lyra McMahon, I explore the funny, twisted, and often uncomfortably dark truths about humanity and what it takes to try and make sense of it. View my art, and read my essay series.
Leaving a Personal Legacy as a Real Human:
I figure my website is as good a place as any for writing a statement about what I want my personal legacy to be, given the reality that we never really know when our lives might end. As someone who finds myself living on the other side of a suicide attempt, I still feel in-touch with the thought that nothing really matters. It all vanishes. In the end, I want to be known and remembered not for how I have been good or the impactful things I have done but for my creativity, my sense of humor, and my fierce belief in the worthiness of all mad people, addicts, and alcoholics no matter any mistakes we have made. I don’t believe there are good or bad people, but I do think some people choose to be more courageous, honest, and real than others. That is what I aspire to be, and those are the values I seek to uphold. Follow me on Medium.
