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The National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Inc held a conference on June 22nd at NYU Medical Center. It was called "Shaping the Future of Mental Health Care: Let Your Voice Be Heard!" In a small transitioning ceremony, former president Karen Shore, PhD passed the torch to new president Deborah Peel, MD, but not before being the first recipient of an award named after her: the Karen Shore Award for Mental Health Care Advocacy. In her farewell remarks, Shore made statements like: "We need to completely eliminate the managed care industry (a major theme of the conference) and its control over mental health care," and, "Almost all our social problems are mental health problems."

In her welcoming remarks Peel said, "Knowing what I know now I am not sure I would become a physician again… I would become a reporter because we need to get our message out." The Coalition's message was in their "Inform America Campaign," a massive national campaign to educate everyone in this country about what health plans must provide to insure everyone gets real mental health care. "The only way we can get decent mental health care is if the public and Congress are educated and informed," she said.

The conference began with speeches by five distinguished panelists: Robert Michels, MD, professor of medicine and psychiatry at Cornell University; Harold Eist, MD, past president of the American Psychiatric Association; Robert O'Harrow, Jr., the Washington Post's senior reporter on privacy and technology; Sheri Larivee, consumer advocate and Nick Unger, veteran trade unionist.

Michels and Eist shared sentiments that we have made great progress in identifying and treating mental disorders but due to managed care failures, treatment of the mentally ill is a national disgrace. Eist placed a special emphasis on children's mental health disparities. O'Harrow insisted that protecting the confidentiality of medical records is essential to health care reform. Larivee crusaded for her mentally ill daughter whose managed care company would not cover necessary treatments for her suicidal child. "It was better to have no health insurance coverage at all than to be on a managed care plan," she said. Unger, in reference to Larivee's heroics said: "We have a system where you have to be a hero to be treated like an average person." He stressed universal and affordable health care as our country's goal.

Representative Patrick Kennedy delivered an impassioned speech about how mental illness is as serious as physical illness. He also discussed stigma from his perspective as a mental health consumer and Congressman: "Perception is 9/10 of reality in our business… I still park my car four blocks away from my psychiatrist… because I am still in desperate fear of the stigma that exists." He said he was grateful to Tipper Gore for giving him the courage to also openly disclose his depression and advocate for the mentally ill. In reference to the incarceration of the mentally ill he said: "We're imprisoning their bodies when their minds are all ready in prison." As a Congressman he knew first-hand that only five of every hundred government dollars was spent on mental health.

Representative Richard Gephardt, House Minority Leader and closing speaker, also gave an impassioned speech, but unlike Kennedy, his speech was very global and skirted around the issue of mental health and mental illness. What he did say on the issue was: "The problem is nobody wants to talk about mental health… it is unpleasant and so we fear it and then we push it aside." He ended on a note for universal healthcare coverage: "Love is the greatest power in the world and if we love our fellow human beings we will fight to make healthcare accessible to every one of us."