That’s where I’ll be for a recovery-themed conference all day Thursday, so I’ll not be blogging.
liz | 11:36 PM | Uncategorized
Liz Spikol was born in Philadelphia sometime in the 20th century. She started writing about her experience as a person with mental illness in 1999, while employed at Philadelphia Weekly as the paper’s managing editor. Aside from serving as that paper’s web editor, music editor, staff writer, senior editor, executive editor and a host of other random roles that she couldn’t make up her mind about, she has also worked as a Spanish teacher, as a Certified Peer Specialist during Philly’s system-wide transformation and as a communications specialist for a prison reform organization. Currently, she works at the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania and writes book reviews for PW. This blog — named one of the Top 10 Bipolar Blogs of 2007 and 2008 by PsychCentral — is about medications, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, SAD (and many other acronyms), mad pride, Big Pharma, celebrities, hospitals, stigma and the recovery movement. And other stuff.
Well Hell’s Bells,
Have yourself a lovely time out there! Enjoy the country, the nature and the recovery of all that’s lost.
Well into the Era of Recovery, where providers freely use recovery nomenclature, assert their programs incorporate the principles of recovery, and claim their outcomes reflect their use of recovery based practices (sans any data to support both the outcomes and the contention), will the words and deeds ever intersect?
It would be tragic if the Era of Recovery was largely a seismic shift in language and fodder for countless conferences and publications as was the case in the previous eras of Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Evidence Based Practices. Persons using mental health services deserve better this time around. Words and good intentions are never enough; they never have been.
“National Consensus Statement on Mental Health Recovery” and the basis for a wealth of questions when a provider asserts that he or she has implemented the principles of recovery.
http://mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/publications/allpubs/sma05-4129/
Let’s hope that Liz finds that the representations reflect the underlying reality and that progress towards a system predicated on recovery is being made.
It was nice to meet you! So glad you were the Keynote and I was just the intro – phew! It is always great to meet another crazy lady, I mean consumer, making it in the real world. Philadelphia is real, right?
I wanted to thank you for speaking at our Vision of Hope event today. You were the most honest, genuine person I have heard speak about their experience with mental illness. Everything you had to say made me think about the way I interact with the people I serve (as a job coach), and about my own mental illness. We’ll be talking about you for a long time, and I’m sure you now have quite a few more avid readers of your blog.
Hi Liz,
Thanks for an awesome presentation in Lancaster! Your story really moved me, and made me see things in a different light!
Hope you enjoyed little old Lancaster!
Jess
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