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I am an administrator and Peer Advocate for the Brooklyn Peer Advocacy project, in addition to Citywide Editor with NYC Voices. I am also a consumer of mental health services and it is in this capacity that I wish to address our readers.

The very fact that I have been asked to write about the consumer movement, as it pertains to those of us with a diagnosis, is a testament to the changing, challenging and encouraging role that the mentally ill are play in today's mental health system.

No longer passive receivers of care, consumers are now a vital part of our own recovery -- this is called self-empowerment. It is not a role that abrogates or undermines that of health care professionals. Psychiatrists, therapists, social workers and other caregivers have an expertise that is not automatically granted to those coping with a mental illness, and it is neither disempowering nor self-denying to ask providers for help.

The role that the professional plays in our recovery is a vital one, but it should not be an all-encompassing one -- and more and more in today's mental health system, it is not one. Recipients, tired of being thought of as helpless, hopeless, and hospital-ready, have taken the bulls by the horns and demanded a seat at the table.

Of what importance to the communities in which they live is the mentally ill's steady movement towards self-empowerment and recovery? Much importance! Communities benefit when recipients are able to remain in the community and stay out of hospitals. Hospitalizations are more expensive -- $61,000 per year per person -- than outpatient services. Recipients who, having Peer Advocates as role models, may begin to wean themselves from benefits and return as part-time or full-time workers, and this, too, is an enhancement to the communities. This benefit, of course, goes well beyond economics -- when people's talents are utilized, everyone benefits.

One of the greatest barriers still faced by the mentally ill -- and one that can come from within as well as without -- is stigma. Stigma towards the mentally ill is what racism is to African-Americans and other racial minorities, anti-Semitism is to Jews, and sexism is to women -- a refusal to see people as they really are, a substitution of easy stereotypes for the more complex realities, and, always, a failure to understand what strength and progress the affected group can give. Today we read about possible break-throughs in the treatment of cancer -- might they not have come earlier if medical schools had not at one time routinely excluded certain people? We will never know what has been lost to us because of prejudice and ignorance. We can, however, fight attempts to let the gifts and abilities of those who happen to be mentally ill go to waste.

Perhaps the toughest battle is to convince recipients themselves that the negative messages they have heard far too often are untrue. We must first convince ourselves that to be mentally ill does not mean inferior, does not mean violent, does not mean useless.

I have been in treatment for some 14 years. I have been an advocate for 4 of those years. Nothing I have seen in that time makes me anything less than optimistic than positive charge is possible for all of us. The fight continues...