Empowerment Conference Promotes Peer Support
On Tuesday, October 1, 2002, The Mental Health Empowerment Project convened 400 people for its annual New York City conference titled "Pathways to Wellness: The Importance of Peer Support." The conference took place at South Beach Psychiatric Center on Staten Island. With its low-slung, college-style campus next to the ocean, South Beach could have been mistaken for California, the land of opportunity.
Speaking of opportunity, the Mental Health Empowerment Project (MHEP) has since 1988 sought to enable recipients to be "producers" of mental health rather than "consumers" of mental health services. MHEP has largely accomplished that by supporting self-help groups around the state with training seminars and technical assistance. As a result, self-help groups have grown from a few dozen to more than 600.
Instead of applying psychology to traditional diagnosis and therapy, MHEP uses psychology to jump-start people's lives in the service of recovery.To put it another way, with a little help from our friends, we all have the potential to be community leaders.
MHEP offered a tantalizing menu of workshops with two themes: how to get your individual needs for recovery met and how to change the system through self-help groups and peer support. So, is there a place to have fun while recovering from mental illness? The teachers of such sessions as "Creating Wall Plaques" and "Moving Meditation Fitness," clearly believed that making things is a way of remaking yourself.
In one workshop, you could get your individual as well as your social needs met. Sheila Shulman Le Gacy from Syracuse led "Family Education: Good for Everyone." Participants learned that "the best family education models share many of the goals and values of the psychiatric rehabilitation model: empowerment, commitment to the possibilities of growth and change, peer support and acceptance, a non-authoritarian stance, and a spiritual perspective."
Sheila Shulman Le Gacy was one of many conference participants who received awards for their innovative work. In Sheila's case, the award was for making consumers part of family education; consumers are often excluded.
Other award winners were Marion Schaal for outstanding support of consumer initiatives; Susan Orens for advocacy that assures that consumer rights are being protected; Lauren Tenney for commitment to advocating for children's rights; Frank Marquit for development of the arts as an expression for consumers and Lenny Weinzweig for outstanding support of Double Trouble in Recovery.
MHEP's awards were not the pro forma "We couldn't have done it without you," but recognition for people who have poured their lives into their work, thus breaking the mold.