Mission: To carry a message of recovery, empowerment, hope and healing
to people with
lived experience
with mental health issues, trauma, and extreme
states.
Daniel B. Fisher Briefs Vermont Lawmakers on Mental Health Reform
Daniel B. Fisher with VT Commissioner Patrick Flood. Photo credit: Morgan Brown
In Fisher’s mind, and in his experience, the state has the chance to bring about a historic shift, away from hospitalizations and what he said was rampant overuse of medication to a system of care that uses evidence-based alternatives that work.
Here is an excerpt from the USA Today OpEd written by Joseph Rogers, executive director of the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse:
Studies have shown that what works is not force but access to effective services. We don't need to change the laws to make it easier to lock people up; existing laws provide for that when warranted. Instead, we need to create and fund effective community-based mental health services and supports that would make it attractive for people to come in and receive care, and that would support them in their recovery. We also must end the discrimination that discourages people from seeking help. [Click here to access the USA Today OpEd] [Click here for a version with complete references]
So, What's Wrong with Hearing Voices?
Daniel Hazen and Oryx Cohen Featured on Major Provider Website
Recently Daniel Hazen and Oryx Cohen co-presented on the worldwide Hearing Voices Network at an event in New York City. The Editor-in Chief of Behavioral Healthcare, Dennis Grantham, was in the audience and wrote a fantastic article about what he learned. It is now the lead story of their publication, and you can check it out at: www.behavioral.net
New Video Introduces Four Peer-Run Respite Programs
Dan Fisher, Keris Myrick, and other participants emphasized the need to consider the whole person and their need to be active participants in their community. Open Dialogue, peer-run respites and other forms of peer support were highlighted as trauma informed, recovery approaches which can reduce the over-reliance on medication.
Denmark group studies local nonprofit's nontraditional health care
Voices of the Heart is a nonprofit that focuses on providing support through counseling, conversation and social interaction to encourage people to get help before they reach crisis, or to help them avoid hospitalization when they are in crisis. Among its services is a "peer respite program" in Hudson Falls, essentially a two-bedroom apartment where people in crisis can stay and receive support. Click here to read more.
Patients Who Use Anti-Depressants Are More Likely to Suffer Relapse, Researcher Finds
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2011) — Patients who use anti-depressants are much more likely to suffer relapses of major depression than those who use no medication at all, concludes a McMaster researcher. Click here to read the full text of the article.
SAMHSA and the Recovery Movement: A Discussion with Lauren Spiro and Oryx Cohen
Voices of the Heart Peer-Run Respite
Executive Director Daniel Hazen gives a tour of the Glens Falls, NY Peer-Run Respite. For a longer version, please click here.
Peer-support approach challenges long-held views of mental illness
GLENS FALLS, N.Y.
Brad Morrow had his first encounter with the mental health system when he was in his late 30s.
In the space of 15 minutes, a psychiatrist he’d never met before told him he had bipolar disorder, gave him some prescriptions and told him to come back in a month.
The diagnosis, so quickly pronounced, became “like a death sentence,” more shattering than the psychic pain for which he was seeking help, Morrow recalled. He’d previously considered himself a “really creative person,” but the diagnosis changed that. Now he had a label -- and a stigma.
Finnish Open Dialogue: High recovery rates leave many psychiatric beds empty
My Reflections on the Finnish Open Dialogue Project By Daniel Mackler
In June of 2010, I visited Western Lapland in Finland for two weeks. My goal was to make a documentary film on the Open Dialogue project. Although the film is now complete, and I feel it tells their story fairly well, there remains a lot that I left out — things I somehow, for one reason or another, couldn’t capture on camera.
Podcasts and Summaries of Alternatives 2011 Now Available
Couldn't make it to Alternatives this year? Peers Engaging in and Envisioning Recovery Services (P.E.E.R.S.) has produced groundbreaking real-time social media coverage featuring in-depth recaps of the premier national consumer conference. Click here to access the podcasts and summaries.
Gayle Bluebird received a Voice Award on October
13, 2010
Longtime consumer/survivor activist and artist Gayle
Bluebird received this prestigious award in Los Angeles, CA. Click here to read her acceptance
speech.
Phase one of the New Health Care Reform Law took
effect 9/23/10
In the six months since President Obama signed the
Affordable Care Act into law, we have been hard at work implementing the law and
focusing on putting consumers ahead of insurance companies. Go to - www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/overview.html
Mental Health Messages Actually Increase Stigma
The message that “mental illness is just a disease”
isn’t reducing stigma. It’s actually making the stigma worse... Instead of
emphasizing how different people with mental disorders are, especially when the
scientific field has many open questions, messages should acknowledge that
everyone struggles with ups and downs. [Click
here to read the full article]
"Engaged, Employed and Wrestling With Mental
Illness"
Inspiring recovery story of Anthony Sgarlato. "When
he was in his 40s, he started volunteering as a peer counselor at Baltic Street
A.E.H., a nonprofit group in Brooklyn that provides services to clients with
mental illness. It was a perfect match: He helped men and women whose battles he
knew well to get benefits or to find housing. He embraced the role of advocate,
traveling several times to Albany to lobby lawmakers for greater benefits for
mentally ill people. Mr. Sgarlato worked his way up, and now is the director of
self-help and advocacy at the center." [Click
here to read the full text of the N.Y. Times article]
Free Podcasts and Slides from Self-Determination
Summit Available
Learn more about self-determination in a time of
economic uncertainty, with an emphasis on person-directed recovery, peer-run
services, economic security, and transparency and accountability in behavioral
health care. Featuring presentations from Debbie Whittle, NEC TAC Director and
NEC Executive Director Daniel Fisher. To access the podcasts and slide
presentations, click here.
Comparative-Effectiveness Advocates Vow Better
Outcomes Will Follow
The additional research on treatment options will not be able to meet its
stated aim of improving mental health care treatment outcomes, however, unless
it includes a range of options, maintain some mental health experts. For
psychiatrist Daniel Fisher, M.D., Ph.D., those options should include
patient-centered care and the use of “patient peers” in treatment. [Click
here to read the article]
Mental health: Out of the cuckoo's nest
A
radical US advocate for psychiatric patients' rights brings to the UK his
first-hand message that a diagnosis of mental illness is not a life sentence
"Dan Fisher, a prominent psychiatrist who is advising the Obama administration
on mental health issues, has been on a personal mission for two decades to
change the way wider society understands and reacts to mental illness. An
advocate of the "recovery model" – which posits that a diagnosis of mental
illness is not for life, and that people can recover completely – Fisher is an
outspoken and controversial figure in the US, campaigning vigorously for the
rights of people diagnosed with a mental illness." [Click
to read the full article]
National Mental Health Advocates Join Hogg Foundation's Advisory Council
AUSTIN, Texas Renowned mental health experts and consumer advocates Dr.
Daniel Fisher and LaVerne Miller, Esq., have been appointed to the National
Advisory Council of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.
The 10-member council advises foundation staff on strategic direction and
potential funding initiatives. Council members have Texas-based or national
expertise in mental health, consumer advocacy, philanthropy and other fields
related to the foundation's mission of promoting the mental health of all
Texans. [Read More...]
Intervoice Letter to Parents of Children who Hear Voices
Open letter to Oprah Winfrey in response to her program
about “The 7-Year-Old Schizophrenic”
Dear Oprah
We are writing this letter in response to your program about “The 7-Year-Old
Schizophrenic”. This concerned Jani, a child who hears voices, and was broadcast
on the 6th October 2009.
We do so in the hope we can provide a more hopeful and positive alternative
to the generally pessimistic picture offered by the members of the mental health
community featured in the program, and in the accompanying article on your
website. [Read more...]
Are you Depressed, or Just Human? By Dr. Andrew Weil
Many cultures find the American insistence on constant cheerfulness and pasted-on smiles disturbing and unnatural. Occasional, situational sadness is not pathology -- it is part and parcel of the human condition, and may offer an impetus to explore a new, more fulfilling path.
Read more at: www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/are-you-depressed-or-just_b_307734.html
Judge in NYC rules that 4300 mental health consumers are unduly segregated
in adult psychiatric homes
New York State discriminated against thousands of mentally ill people in New
York City by leaving them in privately run adult homes, which effectively
replaced state-run psychiatric hospitals more than a generation ago but turned
out to be little more than institutions themselves, a federal judge ruled on
Tuesday. [Click to read full
article]
New Review of 20 studies shows that being labeled with mental illness does
not increase the risk of violence
Psychiatric peer review touted: Care termed a low-cost, effective
alternative
People with psychiatric illness get better care from other people with a
psychiatric history than from traditional doctors and psychologists in a
traditional medical setting, according to Daniel B. Fisher. [Click
to read full article]
Consumer-Directed Medicaid Services more Effective than
Professionally-Directed Services
The above SAMHSA funded study by Ce Shen, Ph.D. and others published in
the November 2008 Psychiatric Services found that self-directed care
works well for persons with mental illnesses. [Read
more...]
New research study finds unlocked, mental health consumer-managed, crisis residential program produce better
results than locked, inpatient psychiatric facilities
For adults with severe psychiatric problems, consumer-managed residential
programs may be the way to go, a new study suggests.
Title of Study: A Randomized Trial of a Mental Health
Consumer-Managed Alternative to Civil Commitment for Acute Psychiatric Crisis. [Click
for more]
Forced Treatment Doesn’t Work
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A
radical US advocate for psychiatric patients' rights brings to the UK his
first-hand message that a diagnosis of mental illness is not a life sentence
"Dan Fisher, a prominent psychiatrist who is advising the Obama administration
on mental health issues, has been on a personal mission for two decades to
change the way wider society understands and reacts to mental illness. An
advocate of the "recovery model" – which posits that a diagnosis of mental
illness is not for life, and that people can recover completely – Fisher is an
outspoken and controversial figure in the US, campaigning vigorously for the
rights of people diagnosed with a mental illness." [
