Daniel B Fisher 1 hr · Would love your feedback during the next week on this proposal for a campaign to energize our movement: Launching a National Campaign for Hope and Recovery By Daniel Fisher, Board member, National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery Our National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery needs to rally our movement through a bold new “Campaign for Hope and Recovery. ” Our voice for persons with lived experience is more important than ever. We are told we bring false hope to persons and their families labeled with mental health issues. We say we have to end epidemic of hopelessness sweeping our country. We know from our lived experience that people with even the most severe conditions can and do recover. Major institutions in our society have made a priority to rob the public of hope, to dismantle our recovery movement, to over use medications, to redirect SAMHSA towards coercion and forced treatment, and violate the few civil liberties persons labeled with mental health issues have. These initiatives are clear in the Murphy Bill, HR 3717. We must step forward to counter this dangerous trend and create our own proactive platform for the next 5 years, rather than always being in a reactive posture. We can then re-educate the public so they see that we are the greatest innovators of mental health care, not persons to be feared. We can start the campaign with local, regional, and national groups meetings, to select diverse delegates for a summit of our movement in Washington,DC, in July 2015, to coincide with the ADA’s 25th anniversary. In these meetings, we can start with policy priorities that our Coalition has been highlighting, and perhaps make each into a plank of a platform. A few of our basic themes are: 1. Protection of our human rights, so that despite being labeled we are still covered by the bill of rights, such as due process 2. Sustainable funding for our peer-run policy and support organizations similar to funding for the Independent Living Centers. 3. Funding for Recovery and peer support at federal and state levels, as directed by SAMHSA 4. This campaign will increase public knowledge of the proven effectiveness of such hopeful, self-determined, community-based alternatives to the ineffective, maintenance-based, conventional “mental health treatment” modalities which we are coerced into utilizing 5. The transformation from a hope-robbing, maintenance system of treatment to a hopeful, self-determined community-based set of supports in areas of planning, training, and evaluation will be driven by those of us with lived experience of recovery, because we are experts by experience Then we can meet in Washington close to July 26, 2015, to celebrate the ADA with other disability groups and to collectively determine the best strategy at national and state levels to carry out this platform.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 01:11:00 +0000
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