Dr. Johanna Ferman is a public psychiatrist, formerly the Deputy Commissioner for the New York State Office of Mental Health, whose work with high-risk populations experiencing chronic disability and homelessness has been nationally recognized for its innovation and sustainability over decades.

Her early experiences with the “revolving door” cycle included work as a clinician at Rikers Island Jail.  This catalyzed her commitment to changing outcomes for people with serious mental illness (SMI) in the wake of deinstitutionalization.  After several years in program evaluation and setting standards for mental health in New York City’s jail system, she was asked to build a new Division of Clinical Programs to revitalize the State’s public mental health sector. This resulted in sustainable seeding and enhancement of services ranging from physical health for the SMI population to the mentally ill and chemical abusing (MICA), with significant expansion in vocational services.

Her passion has been the design and implementation of approaches to care that integrate mental health, substance use and physical health care as well as ‘life and the arts.’ As the CEO and Medical Director for The Center for Mental Health in the nation’s capital, she created The Family Health Model, with its demonstrated shift in outcomes for high-risk children and adults, many of whom had experienced chronic homelessness.

She has elevated the importance of timely, accurate data and value-based reimbursement to transforming practice, with the recognition that the behavioral health field has lagged in its implementation of quality improvement techniques. From 2018-2024, she and her partner, Tomás Moran (see below) conceptualized and brought to fruition a value-based payment (VBP) initiative with the Community Mental Health Fund of Jackson County, Missouri. The Fund is a 35-year-old tax-payer supported levy, among the first in the United States to be legislated by voters to assist in underwriting uncompensated care and gaps in the mental health safety net. The VBP Initiative is the first of its kind in the United States, building measures and engaging front-end providers from the ground-up rather than typical top-down implementation.

Her work has garnered Robert Woods Johnson grant support and the Gold Award of the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Ferman is currently conceptualizing a new paradigm for the public mental health sector. She is doing this through writing and audio-interview work which will take the form of topical conversations, podcasts, live interviews and Town Hall forums with diverse thought leaders, including consumers and family members.

She received a B.Sc Honors in Physiology from University College London, then completed her medical training at Wayne State University Medical Center, with her Adult Psychiatry residency at Wayne State and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical School prior to a Fellowship Year in Consult Liaison Psychiatry at Montefiore-Einstein Medical Center in New York City, where she also taught medical students. She is fluent in Spanish and Board Certified in Psychiatry and Neurology. Above and beyond all, she is a passionate advocate for kindness and humor as antidotes for much of what ails us.