Conferences

Mental Health Recovery: Practice, Services and Research

October 27 - 28, 2010

While recovery is an individual journey of healing and transformation, recovery as a social project requires social investments, accommodations, and real opportunities for participation. We ask: what would it take to put lives of substance and stature - lives of their own authorship - within the reach of people who have been assigned psychiatric diagnoses. And what roles should mental health services and the service users themselves play?

This Conference will combine cutting edge approaches and new ways of thinking about human lives and service systems to articulate the promise and possibilities for recovery in practice, policy and research

Day One - Focus on Practice

Keynotes

Wellness: A Model for Personal and Professional Transformation
Peggy Swarbrick
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Wellness is an important concept for mental health service delivery system transformation and this conversion includes professionals assuming personal responsibility for wellness. Personal, system and organizational barriers and challenges exist though social; work practice can benefit from applying wellness principles in personal practices. This keynote will examine in further detail how a wellness model can be an effective means of assisting persons living with mental illness. Participants will become aware of the 8 dimensional model of wellness Understand the role of economic self sufficiency, focus on physical health, social support and education and employments as key factors in recovery. Participants will have the opportunity to examine personal strengths and areas for personal change and professional or program development.

A Social Workers Vision Creates a Viable Recovery & Wellness Service Model
Mark Duffy
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Mark Duffy, LCSW will share how he has been inspired by the wellness and recovery movement to collaborate with people living with mental illness to design and delivery innovative services. Learn how one lone social worker has made a tremendous impact by parenting with people in recovery to create services that are positively impacting the lives of many.

Achieving Wellness by Addressing Poverty and Self Sufficiency
Peggy Swarbrick
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Poverty, under and unemployment are formidable barriers impacting wellness and recovery. Learn about asset building self sufficiency programs designed and delivered by people living with mental illness in NJ and NJ. Hear from a panel of people in recovery who are assuming lead roles impacting policy and practices related to self sufficiency.

Turning the Recovery Model Downside Up and Outside In
Courtenay M. Harding
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Download Courtenay Harding's presentation materials now »

There is contemporary worldwide research evidence that even the worst cases of serious and persistent mental health problems can and do significantly improve and many even fully recover across time. Systems of care around the globe have declared recovery visions, missions, and transformation plans. New York is no exception. This keynote will review the 11 long-term studies of two and three + decades in length which have demonstrated amazing congruence across countries about the possibilities of recovery. Building upon those findings, persons with the lived experience have taken the lead by example and increasingly sophisticated advocacy to continually push for changes in policy and programs in order to promote opportunities for wellness. The paradigm shift from the "Dominance of Deficits" to a Recovery Model has been happening slowly but surely for the past 50+ years. Focus will be upon the significant differences between expecting remission vs expecting recovery and how such distinguishing features can promote or undo all the good intentions and efforts put forth by the state, the city and local clinical programs. We are talking here about a major cultural and clinical shift. The keynote will address a variety of creative approaches as well as some which get in the way.
Workshops

Promoting Employment for Consumers
Bob Goldblatt, Isaac Brown, Lauren Gates, John Allen

The goal of the workshop is to provide the audience with a breadth and depth of understanding about employment as an integral part of the recovery process. Through a panel of experts and participation there will be an examination of the evolution of employment as an essential component of recovery. There will be a presentation of models of employment from peer run agencies; and, resources at the New York City and State levels to facilitate employment. Personal experiences will be shared as well as research findings that clarify policies and practices regarding employment of individuals with mental health condition with emphasis on issues of accommodation and disclosure. There will also be a presentation of a soon to be introduced statewide, interagency employment initiatives for individuals with mental health conditions.

Towards a Holistic Model
Pablo Sadler, Peter Stastny, Harvey Rosenthal

Healing, wellness and recovery are very personal processes and increasingly involve alternatives to traditional medical, therapy and mental health program. The presenters will provide details around these alternative practices (e.g. shiatsu, acupuncture, T'ai Chi, yoga, 12 step programs and other mutual support groups, EMDR, spirituality and recovery counseling) and programs (Soteria, First Break, peer crisis diversion and bridger services). They will also discuss the role of medication as part of a vehicle to help achieve the person's life goals and not as a control tool (e.g. power sharing, medication choice, medication discontinuation).

Transforming Organizations to a Recovery Orientation
Steve Coe and Donna Colonna

Mental health programs are increasingly promoting recovery, wellness, and resiliency. Many have taken steps to re-train staff and hire individuals with recovery experiences as service providers. These trends can result in a genuine shift in methods and actions by staff that reflect a true collaboration with the individuals being served. Community Access and Services for the Underserved have worked on transforming their organizations and their service models based on the belief that people with serious mental illness can make meaningful choices in their lives and successfully overcome the barriers to their wellness and recovery. The presenters will describe the practical steps in their organizational journeys, sharing tools and lessons learned that have allowed them to integrate recovery-oriented values into everyday practice. The session will be interactive and workshop participants will be encouraged to describe their own experiences and explore dilemmas inherent in a rights-based model.

From Principles to Practice: The Integration of Culture and Recovery
Carlton Whitmore and Laurene Finley

Disparities in mental health services continue to plague our service delivery system. Recovery provides us with a new opportunity to infuse novel and comprehensive culturally competent approaches to the delivery of recovery oriented services. This workshop will address the need for more comprehensive and novel approaches that can be applied at the practitioner, programmatic and systemic levels. Attendees will discuss the relationship between recovery and culture, and also examine current practices that promote recovery and cultural empowerment.

Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP©) a practical and structured system facilitating the journey of recovery
Ruth Pasillas-Gonzales, Dani Heifetz, Elana Kun, Rosemarie Guidice

In this workshop panelists from a diverse group of service delivery settings including Personalized Recovery Oriented Services (PROS), In Patient, Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) and Partial Hospital will share how they integrated Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP®) into their programs. Panelists will discuss their experience of adapting wrap to their unique environments, how they overcame obstacles and share consumer recovery outcomes, from this highly effective and collaborative tool. WRAP, an Exemplary Practice, developed by Mary Ellen Copeland, Ph.D., enables an individual experiencing mental health challenges to create wellness enhancing activities, build self-efficacy through understanding their triggers and early warning signs, develop coping strategies and collaborate with supporters to develop a comprehensive crisis and post-crisis plan.

Day Two - Focus on Research

Day two of the Conference was generously sponsored by the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts at the Nathan S. Kline Institute. You can view more information about speakers and presentations from Day Two by visiting the NKI's web site.

Keynotes & Plenaries

Perspective on Recovery - Policy, Practice, Research
Michael Hogan, Mary Jane Alexander and Joshua Koerner
Watch Michael Hogan's presentation now, with introduction by Kim Hopper »
Watch Joshua Koerner's presentation now »

Charge to Workshops & Roundtables: Advancing the Research Agenda
Kim Hopper

Closing Session: Promise and Possibilities
David Shern, Denise Juliano-Bult
Watch David Shern's presentation now »
Workshops

Choice-Focused Services in Community Practice
Benjamin Henwood, John Jost, Stacy Matuza and Ellen Healion

Center partners explore how research and practice innovation collaborate to integrate choice and agency into organizational cultures through 1) a Community Based Participatory Research Community Medicine Model (Pathways To Housing); 2) Consumer choice in supported housing case management (Center for Urban Community Services); 3) Support and accountability in peer-run mental health services (Hands Across Long Island).

Complex Recoveries - Identifying Issues and Solutions
Mary Jane Alexander, Lenora Reid-Rose, Christina Pratt and Joshua Koerner

These projects examine how to support recovery in the face of challenges that cross generations and systems: Developing peer support for families at high risk for repeated homelessness where the mother has a mental health diagnosis; Cultural competence and peer support for at-risk African American adolescents and their families (PASS); How can mental health courts promote and support recovery?

Housing, Home & Community
Deborah Padgett, Victoria Stanhope and Ana Stefancic

Investigators and Center provider partner Pathways to Housing explore the role of housing in engagement, community integration and recovery among homeless adults.

Redefining Outcomes to incorporate the value of Self-Determination
Kim Hopper, Nora Jacobson, Michael Rowe and Philip Yanos

A series of conceptual working papers on Amartya Sen's concept of agency.

The Added Value of Community Participation in Research on Health & Well Being
Lara Weinstein, Kristine Jones, Sophie Mitra, David Brown, Priscilla Ridgway & Eileen McGinn

These studies exemplify how community based participatory research impacts the development of models and measures in research that spans communities and national surveys: Integrating health into supported housing - adapting a chronic care model for newly housed people with mental health diagnoses; Developing multi-dimensional measures of poverty using CBPR and mixed methods; Developing and testing a Capabilities-based model of Health Inequities experienced by people using public mental health services.
Roundtables

Peer Participation in Research
Amy Colesante and Ellen Healion

Methods for Capabilities-Informed Research
Sophie Mitra and Philip Yanos

System Obstacles and Opportunities
Tony Hannigan

More Information

Brochure & Registration
Speaker Bios

Kim Hopper

Kim Hopper, PhD is the Co-Director of Center to Study Recover in Social Contexts and, along with Mary Jane Alexander, is Principal Investigator of the Center's Field School to Develop Research Capacity Among Community Partners. He is also an Investigator on the Center projects "Shared Decision Making", "An Approachable Approach: Creating a User Friendly Version of the Capabilities Framework", "Measuring Capabilities-Enhancing Environments", and "Culturally Competent Capabilities". Dr. Hopper is a medical anthropologist and is currently a Research Scientist within the Statistics and Services Research Division at NKI as well as a Professor of Clinical Socio-medical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. He also Adjunct Professor at the Law School, Research Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, and President's Professor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He was a member of the WHO Collaborative International Study of Schizophrenia, and co-author of several articles and chapters on its findings. Dr. Hopper is the Principal Investigator of the Shared Decisions project at the Center.

David L. Shern

With more than 30 years of distinguished service, David L. Shern, Ph.D. is one of the nation's foremost leaders in mental health services research and system reform. Currently the President and CEO of Mental health America, the preeminent mental health organization in the country, his work has spanned a variety of mental health services research topics, including: epidemiological studies of the need for community services; the effects of differing organizational, financing and service delivery strategies on continuity of care and client outcome and the use of alternative service delivery strategies such as peer counseling and self help on the outcomes of care. He has authored more than 100 publications including papers in Health Affairs, Psychiatric Services, Medical Care, Health Services Research, Behavioral Health Services and Research and the American Journal of Public Health.
Mary Jane Alexander

Mary Jane Alexander, PhD is the Director of the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts and of the Social Science and Innovation laboratory at the Nathan Kline Institute. Dr. Alexander is also the Research Core Co-Director and an Investigator of the project "Operationalizing Capabilities Framework for Mental Health Services Research". She is a social psychologist whose research in the public mental health systems since 1980 has included understanding and breaking down system level barriers to services for people with mental illness with other complicating histories or conditions such as addiction and trauma histories. She works extensively with stakeholders in local and state behavioral health systems in New York State, and has collaborated with consumer researchers to develop models of Recovery, system indicators for recovery and a model of healing from sexual abuse trauma.

Michael Hogan

Dr. Michael Hogan was confirmed in March 2007 as Commissioner of Mental Health in New York. The NYS Office of Mental Health operates 25 accredited psychiatric hospitals, and oversees New York's $5B public mental health system that serves 650,000 individuals annually. Dr. Hogan served as Director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health (1991-2007) and Commissioner of the Connecticut DMH from 1987-1991. He chaired the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in 2002-2003, and was appointed as the first behavioral health representative on the board of The Joint Commission in 2007. He served (1994-1998) on NIMH's National Advisory Mental Health Council, as President of the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (2003-2005) and as Board President of NASMHPD's Research Institute (1989-2000). He has received leadership awards from the National Governor's Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Campaign for Mental Health Reform, the American College of Mental Health Administration and the American Psychiatric Association.

Peggy Swarbrick

Margaret (Peggy) Swarbrick, Ph.D., O.T.R., C.P.R.P. is CSP-NJ Institute for Wellness and Recovery Training Director, and is a post doctoral fellow in the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Program at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey - School of Health Related Professions. Peggy has been involved in the mental health field since 1977 personally and professionally since 1986. Peggy worked as an occupational therapist in a variety of settings providing wellness and recovery focused services. Peggy has lectured nationally and internationally on recovery and wellness and consumer-operated services and completed doctoral work at New York University, in the Occupational Therapy Program. Peggy has published on the wellness and recovery model, consumer operated services, a commentary on a cognitive behavioral treatment for persons diagnosed with mental illness who experience PTSD, and peer delivered wellness and recovery programs.

Courtenay M. Harding

Courtenay M. Harding, Ph.D. is professor of psychiatry and now the director of the Center for Rehabilitation and Recovery at the Coalition of Behavioral Health Agencies here in NYC. The Coalition is composed of 120 agencies who serve about 350,000 people. She moved here from Boston where she was the Senior Director of Boston University's well-known Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation under William Anthony. Among her research endeavors, Dr. Harding participated in two three-decade NIMH studies of schizophrenia and other serious illnesses and found that many once profoundly disabled persons could and did significantly improve and/ or even fully recover. These findings, similar to eight other long-term studies from across the world, helped to create the Institute for the Study of Human Resilience in order to investigate ways in which people reclaimed their lives. She has been the recipient of over 40 awards and honors including the Alexander Gralnick Research Investigator Award from the American Psychological Association's foundation for "exceptional contributions to the study of schizophrenia and other serious mental illness and for mentoring a new generation of researchers." Dr. Harding has published extensively about rehabilitation and recovery and has presented findings from her studies and clinical work in over 500 state, national, and international meetings. She has worked with 30 states, 11 European and 9 Asian countries to redesign their systems of care.

Mark Duffy

Mark Duffy has been working in the field of mental health for the past 34 years. During this time, he has worked for periods in partial care programs, psychosocial rehabilitation, crisis, outpatient services including a private practice, program development, training and administration. He co-founded Collaborative Support Programs of New Jersey (CSPNJ) in 1985 and has assisted CSPNJ in its growth and through that process has been a stimulus for change within the agency to meet the needs of program constituents. Mr. Duffy has spent the majority of his career working in partnership with persons diagnosed with Serious Mental Illness. He has increasingly seen the value of a Recovery/ Wellness oriented based system with services that support self-help/mutual aid and economic empowerment in assisting individuals with disabilities in reaching their potential.
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