Kenna Says: This whole story is genuinely what happens when Trauma Informed principles are abandoned
On accountability, moral injury, and the leadership of NARBHA Institute
By Malene Comes | Between Trust and Trauma
I cried writing this article.
I want to say that at the start, because I think it matters. I am still recovering from the damage done to me by The Guidance Center — an organization of which Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD is a central leader — and the act of documenting that damage, carefully and publicly, still costs me something real. Cognitive dissonance. Moral injury. PTSD-related flashbacks and crying spells that last for days. An inability to engage with medical professionals that I am still working to rebuild.
I think Dr. Teresa Bertsch knows this. I think she has always known it.
I think there have been zero meaningful changes at The Guidance Center. And in my opinion, my well-being was knowingly — with full forethought and acceptance — sacrificed to protect the reputation of the organization she leads.
Dr. Bertsch holds the title of Chief Wellbeing Officer.
My well-being was of little consequence in this process.
Who Dr. Teresa Bertsch Is
Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD is, by every public measure, a person of extraordinary compassion.
She is a board-certified psychiatrist. She is Chief Medical Officer and Chief Wellbeing Officer of The NARBHA Institute — the Regional Behavioral Health Authority for northern Arizona, the body responsible for overseeing and funding behavioral health providers in the region. She is also CEO of the Northern Arizona Alliance for Behavioral Health, an organization whose very name places accountability at its center.
Dr. Bertsch speaks publicly about moral injury in healthcare professionals. She is described by colleagues as kind, visionary, and mission-driven. In FY 2023/2024 she earned $458,192 — split across NARBHA Institute and The Guidance Center.
Her monthly salary is more than double my yearly income. It is more than most of The Guidance Center’s clients earn in a year.
She has said publicly:
“As a leader, I get the opportunity to make changes that go beyond what I can do in a one-on-one patient visit. I choose mission-driven systems that work well for the people who work in them, as well as for those who benefit from them.”
I want to hold that statement carefully. I want to return to it.
What Happened to Me
I was a client of The Guidance Center — a behavioral health organization whose board majority is appointed by NARBHA Institute, and whose medical leadership Dr. Teresa Bertsch has held.
In 2024 and 2025, I was harmed, crushed, and nearly destroyed within that system. I was unceremoniously dropped without care, without transition planning, without a single phone call to ask if I was still alive. I was left suicidal and broken, with seven hospitalizations directly related to the harm The Guidance Center did to me, and one suicide attempt.
The harm was documented. Complaints were filed with AHCCCS. A licensing board investigation resulted in a formal letter of concern.
The AHCCCS SMI complaints were never meaningfully investigated — not through any channel that existed precisely to investigate them. Those channels run directly through the organization Dr. Teresa Bertsch leads. This is an unethical conflict of interest. It is structural. It is, in my opinion, by design.
The Four Dates
On the following dates, I emailed Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD directly:
- 08/18/2025
- 08/22/2025
- 08/27/2025
- 09/20/2025
In each email, I requested a trauma-informed response to the harm I had suffered inside The Guidance Center. I described what had happened to me. I asked for acknowledgment. I asked for accountability. I asked her, as the person most positioned to respond, to respond.
Dr. Teresa Bertsch did not respond. Not once. Not to a single email across four documented attempts spanning more than a month.
Her compassion extended exactly into silence.
What That Silence Permitted
While Dr. Bertsch chose silence, the organization she leads did not stay quiet.
I was subjected to silencing behavior, blame, and shame. On the internet I was called a person with personality disorders — a diagnosis no other treating physician or mental health professional agreed with, and one that was added to my chart without disclosure, without discussion, and without my informed consent, precisely when I began demanding accountability.
I was contacted by strangers who knew who my therapist was — before I had named that person publicly.
Other clients of The Guidance Center contacted me, appearing to know far too much about my treatment.
I am not claiming I can prove coordination. I am documenting what happened. The pattern speaks for itself.
Moral Injury Has a Mirror
Dr. Teresa Bertsch speaks publicly about moral injury — the damage done to professionals who witness or participate in actions that violate their own ethical commitments. It is a concept she has built part of her public identity around.
Moral injury has a mirror.
The mirror is the harm done to the person on the other side of the institutional silence. The client who documents their own destruction and sends it, carefully and repeatedly, to the person most positioned to respond. Who waits. Who follows up. Who waits again.
NARBHA Institute’s own GuideStar filing states plainly that it “provides substantial financial and in-kind support” to The Guidance Center and “appoints a majority of its governing board.”
Dr. Teresa Bertsch is not a bystander to this structure. She is its medical architect.
When she says she chooses “mission-driven systems that work well for those who benefit from them,” she is describing — by her own stated standard — a system that should have worked for me.
It did not. It destroyed me.
And when given four documented opportunities to respond to that fact, Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD chose silence every time.
This is not trauma-informed care. It is not evidence-based or modern mental health practice. It is not compassion. It is not mission-driven leadership.
It is an institution protecting itself, wearing a human face — while knowingly destroying a client.
They underestimated my capacity to speak up.
I have barely begun.
What This Means
Dr. Bertsch’s professional identity is built on the language of healing, accountability, and care.
The four dates above are what that language looks like in practice.
She is the Chief Wellbeing Officer of an organization whose complaint process failed to investigate a timely claim. She is the medical architect of a system that issued involuntary psychiatric holds without clinical assessment — twice, on the same patient, within ten months. She is the leader who received four documented requests for a trauma-informed response and produced nothing but silence.
In my opinion — stated plainly, under my own name — the silence of Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD is not an oversight. It is a choice. And it is a choice that has consequences for every patient currently inside the system she leads.
Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD: I see you.
