Fischer Clubhouse

from Gerald Butler:
4/19/2008

I recently visited Fisher Clubhouse in Southwest Detroit and it turned out to be a very pleasant, enjoyable, and enlightening trip. I was well received into a relaxed atmosphere and the consumers made me feel very welcomed. I was immediately reminded of the real purpose of the Clubhouses. Many of us either forgot or never learned certain social and life skills and the Clubhouses play a major role in the recovery process. The Clubhouses are where we develop and hone those life skills. It was encouraging to see all these recovery-centered things going on at Fisher Clubhouse.

Through programs, seminars, conferences, etc. professionals advise us on the ‘in and outs’ of recovery. The Clubhouse is one of the few places where we find the ‘Open and Welcoming Environment’ (as recommended by the Freedom Commission) where we can apply what we have been taught. In the Clubhouses of the past we sat around, smoked and played cards all day. Today the Clubhouse is a beehive of learning, freedom, growth, and recovery. When I visit a clubhouse, the first place I look is into the consumers’ faces to see if they are happy and growing. The same sort of happy faces I saw at Fisher Clubhouse I also noticed on visits to ‘Friendship Clubhouse’ in Highland Park and ‘New Journey’ in Detroit. Those smiles are my best gauge of how well the Clubhouse is doing.

One month until Empowerment Day, the excitement is in the air and the ‘Recovery Band’ is on a roll. During May (Mental Health Month) we will be particularly busy doing gigs in the community. Patti Charleston, a Peer Support Specialist, has been working with the band on a special gift she will present at our celebration. Scott Davis, who until recently had never even heard of recovery, will be offering a song he wrote. Denise (D. C.) Holiday will be doing the song ‘Golden’. The main thing is how, through Peer Support, the band is growing closer to each other, and how that camaraderie reflects in the music we play. Yes, the ‘Freedom Train’ has left the station; next stop ‘Samaritan Center’ May 30^th at 9:00 AM.

Paving New Ground

Peers Working in In-Patient Settings:

This is a PDF manual, about 1 Mb in size.

Psychiatric hospitals and state institutions have become increasingly aware of the development of peer specialist roles in inpatient settings and are showing an interest in establishing similar positions in their facilities. Roles for peers, once more common in outpatient settings, are now being created in inpatient settings. Despite the increase many hospitals are uncertain about how to establish and make the best use of these unique positions.
While recognizing there is no one correct way, this “lessons learned” guidebook will identify and highlight some of the hospitals in the country that have been most successful. Through the use of stories and narratives, we will go on a journey to learn about the average day of peer specialists, their special challenges and rewards, and what they most value in their positions. We will also meet their supervisors and hospital/institutional administrators. Whenever possible we went on site to meet personally with the individuals interviewed but since this was not possible in all cases, some interviews took place over the phone.
Learning through experience is the best way to learn. This guidebook will help us appreciate what is possible and to help other hospitals and peers envision and actuate their own futures.
This is no ordinary adventure; it is often spectacular to see what persons in recovery from mental illnesses can do!

Recovery is Possible

from Gerald Butler:

4/3/2008

The coolest thing about being a part of consumer directed events has got to be watching people’s self esteem blossom right before ones eyes. When the ‘Peer Support Specialist Committee’ was first organized it was meant to be an Ad Hoc committee for Empowerment Day. From the beginning we had all sorts of safe guards in place to assure the ‘Committee’ was involved in every aspect of the decision-making process. Due to our Peer Support training, we no longer look upon each other in terms of “I am better than you’ but more as “Lets help each other recover and grow? So over the past few months, we have been learning some exciting things about ourselves and about the system of change.

Whenever a group of people assembles to complete a task, its success is largely dependent on how much respect the members have for each other. If the entire group is on the same page as far as outcomes are concerned, then the odd of success are even greater. As Peer Specialists we place high value on self-respect, respect for others, and that recovery is possible. Therefore it was easy for the committee to get right down to the task at hand, ‘Empowerment Day’. Each member of the committee wants the exact same thing: one day a year dedicated solely and exclusively to the consumer. Both logic and the New Freedom Commission Report dictate that for an event such as this to achieve its goal of consumer empowerment, consumers should handle all aspects of the event.

As we met and decided what needed to be done, it also became clear there was a certain amount of ‘Stigma’ on both our side and administrators. Administrators must accept the fact that consumers are capable of doing great things; all we need is the proper support. Consumers must first believe in ourselves, and then find positive leaders in the system of treatment that believe in us. We expected and received a certain amount of opposition: what we didn’t expect was the large amount of administrators who supported us for no other reason than they simply believed in us. It is not the big leaders in the system who do us harm. The really big leaders of the system are walking by our sides on the road to recovery.

The ‘Peer Support Specialist Empowerment Committee’ is proud to have been able to pour our hearts, souls, labor, compassion, and pure love, into this gift to those whose suffering has entitled them to the best the world has to offer, the Consumer. The biggest thing we hope will happen is that by the end of the day at least one person will have come to believe that: Recovery is Possible.

Gerald Butler

Reflection on GAINS

At the biennial GAINS Conference in Washington DC, members of the Behavioral Health Court team had the opportunity to connect with providers and justice system personnel. The GAINS Center is a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. As stated on the GAINS Center's website,

"The 2008 CMHS National GAINS Center Conference represents a unique opportunity for practitioners and researchers working at the interfaces of the criminal justice and mental health systems to network, learn, and share knowledge on creating effective services for justice-involved individuals with mental illness."

The importance of Forensic Peer Specialists was an enlightening experience for me at the GAINS conference. Forensic Peer Specialists are mental health consumers who can play a key role in helping other consumers recover from their psychiatric disabilities. In the beginning of their integration back to the community, some panelists shared the following: “I needed a reason why I should stop using drugs.” “Being mandated to a program is not the worst thing.” “You need to show up to do your part. Medication doesn’t make you totally better.” Over time, as a person becomes even more integrated into the community, the option of taking a Forensic Peer Specialist Training course can ultimately lead to work in human services organizations that provide services or supports to other mental health consumers.

Peer support coalition forming

Pennsylvania is forming a peer support coalition. The coalition will include all peer support workers (not just certified peer specialists, but anyone who has lived experience and does peer support work) in Pennsylvania. The coalition will have a steering committee, made up of peer support workers from various regions across the state. More information about the coalition, and how to get involved, will be coming.
You can go to PMHCA’s website for more information…. there is a board on the PMHCA forum dedicated to discussion of the coalition.

Reinvigorated

I’ve been working as a peer specialist for several months now–without actually being certified.

This month, I am finally getting the certification training.

I was already excited about that–finally getting the training–but this afternoon, that excitement just ratcheted up a notch. Because this afternoon, I found this: Mental Health Recovery.

It is module 2 of the peer specialist training curriculum by Recovery Innovations (formerly META).

Recovery Innovations was only recently approved to be an official training vendor for peer specialists in Pennsylvania. There are now two approved vendors: Mental Health Association of Southeastern PA (MHAPA), and Recovery Innovations. And to be honest… I was feeling slightly sorry for myself, that I wouldn’t be going through MHAPA’s training. After all, everyone else I know who’s been through the training went to an MHAPA training. And all those people LOVED it, thought it was great, learned so much, had a wonderful time… et cetera, et cetera.

So now, a training comes along–one I’m at last able to get into–and… it’s not MHAPA. It’s Recovery Innovations.

Hmph.

It felt anticlimactic.

There was this little tiny piece of my brain saying, “This better be good.”

How judgmental. Really.

Center helps mentally ill in crisis

Until now, people in Milwaukee County who suffered a mental health crisis, especially after-hours, often ended up in one of three places: a hospital emergency room, the county’s psychiatric hospital, or jail. And often they didn’t belong in any of them.

That changed this month with the opening of the Crisis Resource Center on Milwaukee’s south side, a round-the-clock program aimed at stabilizing patients and then connecting them with services in the community they need to guide their own recovery.

A collaboration of a dozen or so organizations that serve people with mental illness, the center is thought to be the first of its kind nationally to pair nurses and peer support specialists - individuals working through their own recovery - to address not just the crisis at hand but the myriad other problems that might bring a person to the center’s doors.

Letter from Anonymous

My Story

This is my story when I was growing up, especially when I was going to elementary school. I am the oldest of four sisters. Well, I had some pretty hellish stuff happen to me. When I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was molested by an old White man while I was going to the store. It was wintertime: I was supposed to get some bread from the store and this person grabbed me and pulled me into an abandoned car and fondled me. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. When this person let me go I ran home, I was scared. When I got home I got a spanking for making my father late for work, I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened.

Then I had an incident with a medicine bottle. My sister was playing outside and cut her knee real bad. So my mom brought some medicine for my sister’s knee. The medicine bottle was somehow emptied; I think someone must’ve wasted it. Well, I got blamed and punished for it, but I didn’t bother that medicine.

So I was playing around with a rope, pretending to hang myself, just playing around. My dad found out and he took that rope and put it around my neck and just about lifted me off the floor. Then he made a statement saying, “You said you want to be a boy, I’m going to show you how fathers beat their sons”. He beat the hell out of me where I couldn’t go to school for 3 days. My dad didn’t realize what had happened to me and I couldn’t tell him.

Then I had another incident where I was traumatized. I lived in the Jeffries Projects; I was about ten at the time. I was lured into a basement of this older boys house, he said he had some baby kittens he wanted to show me. When I got to the basement this boy pulled out a large butcher knife and threatened to cut my throat if I didn’t do what he said. I was sodomized, and raped, among other things. When I got away, I went home but I couldn’t tell my parents what happened. Instead, my mom gave me a ‘Whuppin’ for not combing my hair.

I started having trouble in school so I had to go and see all them psychiatrists and doctors, I couldn’t tell them either. I was really confused and messed up. I was sent to Lafayette Clinic for several months for observation. I didn’t understand what happened to me. I was put on medication, (it was three kinds of medication). I was in special education up until I was thirteen; I stayed with an aunt for the summer. When she was drunk, she was very abusive and would egg my mom on. I tell you I carried around a lot of anger, so I expressed myself through my drawings. My mom and aunt didn’t understand, so I got ‘Whuppins” for that. It took me a long time to get over my anger and rage. I can relate to and help any person who has been through some hellish s_ _ t like that.

Now I am grown and have a family of my own and my husband is such a blessing, he understands me. I have two wonderful children. With the help of my peers I am doing a lot better. It took me a long time to open up and tell my story: you see, that’s the only way you ‘gonna’ heal. Keeping stuff like that inside can mess you up really bad. It’s like a festering wound with all that poison going through your system, so it has to be lanced to let all that poison out.

My being a consumer doesn’t mean that I can’t overcome a bad childhood, because I can. You can see what I can do because of Gods help. See, now I play with a band called ‘Recovery’ and I am enjoying my new life. I know what it is like to feel worthless: there were times I felt like taking my own life because that’s how worthless I felt. Now that I am enjoying my life, I just want to help somebody else have some hope. People tell me that is peer support.