Founder

Dielle Lundberg, MPH (she/her or ze/hir) is a disabled, mad, and neurodivergent public health data analyst and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is the founder and lead writer for Ableism & Healthcare Now.

Dielle's passion for researching and addressing structural ableism in public health and healthcare is rooted in her lived experience navigating the psychiatric system as a patient diagnosed with what is classified by health providers as "serious mental illness." Throughout her experiences, her voice has often been ignored, her body physically restrained, and her mind forcibly sedated with mood stabilizers and other sedatives. As someone living with chronic fatigue and pain, she has also frequently encountered health providers who do not believe her symptoms or take her seriously. Her experiences reflect what too many disabled people she knows have also endured: navigating the health care system often becomes a major source of stress that makes disabled people less healthy.

Dielle received training in quantitative and qualitative public health research methods as an MPH student at Boston University School of Public Health. She started reflecting on the need for Ableism & Healthcare Now during her time as a PhD student at the University of Washington from 2022 to 2024. She wrote about the experiences of academic ableism that led her to discontinue her studies in an essay series entitled “Mad at/in Health Education”. Despite the lack of structural support for disabled, neurodivergent, and mad students, she was often told that her scholarship and advocacy on structural ableism was critically needed.

In July 2025, Dielle founded Ableism & Healthcare Now as a platform to continue the research and critical analysis she was working on as a disabled person in public health. She launched the project as the lead writer, with the vision of involving colleagues and other researchers as contributors over time. She deliberately designed the project to circumvent many of the structural barriers imposed on disabled scholars by academic research institutions.

Dielle is a white, queer, transfeminine person. Her perspectives on ableism are informed by her experiences as a psychiatrized person (bipolar, PTSD, OCD, addiction), with physical disability (Long Covid, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, moves with walking sticks), and as an autistic person with ADHD (adult discovery/diagnosis). More information about Dielle is available at: diellelundberg.com