Medical College of Georgia Partners with the GA Certified Peer Specialist Project
By Beth Filson, Project Manager, GA CPS Project
“Georgia’s Certified Peer Program is a National Best Practice,” announced Kathryn Power, Director of the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS). “I said it here first and you heard me say it!” An explosion of applause richoted off the walls in the historic building that was the original site of the Medical College of Georgia on Thursday, May 26, 2005. This momentous announcement will pave the way for transformation nationally as every state looks to Georgia for leadership in creating training and certification of Peer Specialists.
The Department of Human Resources, Division of MHDDAD’s GA Certified Peer Specialist Project and the Medical College of Georgia’s School of Psychiatry have created a new partnership in which our insight (mental health consumers/ survivors/ex-patients) into our own recovery experience will be central to mental health care, and “doing things impossible will become the stuff of everyday work,” stated David Stern, Dean of the School of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in his opening remarks for the day’s celebratory gathering, “Pioneers of Recovery: Achieving the Promise of a New Georgia.” Dr. Peter Buckley, Chair MCG Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior, known as an innovator, laid out the goals of this historic partnership: 1.To create a research and evaluation arm for the implementation and practice of peer support and its impact on recovery. 2. To develop curriculum modules for Residents and medical students grounded in consumer directed recovery and peer support. 3. To test out the new mental health partnership between Psychiatrists and the Certified Peer Specialist. “We are preparing future generations of Mental Health Professionals who will understand that people can and will recover with the proper resources,” stated Gwen Skinner, Director of the Division of MHDDAD. Gwen emphasized that transformation of a system, of the people who operate that system, and of the people who receive services in that system must take place within multiple relationships across counties and states. “Georgia’s peer movement has galvanized the attention of a Nation, and has spread halfway around the world to New Zealand,” said Thom Bornemann, Director of the Mental Health Program at the Carter Center. The active participation of Peer Specialists within the culture of medicine will train doctors to let consumers lead in the delivery of services. We as Certified Peer Specialist already understand that our role is to allow the individual to look within him/herself for their own strengths. “We hope Docs have the best knowledge about meds but can also trust us to reach down inside ourselves to manage our illness and take care of our recovery so that we can have a quality life…The answer isn’t in the system, but in the person,” explained consumer leader Larry Fricks, Director of the newly named Consumer Relations and Recovery Section of the Division of MHDDAD. We must “call forth the greatness within every person,” Larry went on to say. “CPSs are trained in specific skills. Their presence is about assisting each other with real competencies that teach and promote self-directed recovery and getting a life.”
One question discussed in the early afternoon clearly demonstrated the struggle some our providers have in understanding our role in the Mental Health System: A Psychologist admitted a lot of difficulty conceptualizing this new partnership with peers. “I don’t even know what questions to begin to ask a Peer Specialist…What will this relationship look like?” Phylis Holliday, Director of the Friendship Community Center, answered him by passionately describing the fear, intimidation, and powerlessness she so often felt in relationship to Mental Health Professionals. She went on to say that we need the strength and hope that the presence of Certified Peer Specialists brings to the treatment setting to take back our own power, and take the lead role in our own care.
This was a kind of epiphany for me. I understood in that moment that our providers are looking to us to understand how they are to be in relationship with us as peers, and that we can and must step up to the plate to teach and educate our supervisors and colleagues about our role in this partnership, symbolized on badges we wore on lapels that declared that we are all “Transformation Agents.” Words like “Historic, Revolutionary,” “Never before,” “Visionary,” and of course “Transformation” were a constant point of reference to the groundbreaking union of a Medical School with the Consumer Movement in GA. Department of Community Health Director/State Medicaid, Mark Trail announced that the peer movement in GA would revolutionize not just mental health care, but health care in general as we lead with a new understanding of peer support in Natural Health. Kathryn Power affirmed this statement with her own: “Mental Health care is not separate from overall health care,” she said. “This is truly momentous,” an “unprecedented movement in Mental Health care,” Kathryn announced in her keynote address. “Georgia has created an emerging workforce of peers who are driving change. This is an historical precedent that can never be erased,” she powerfully affirmed. “We are dealing with a new paradigm that marks a shift in our society in its efforts to transform a system.” Kathryn declared that Georgia’s peer movement is a Civil Rights movement that is about system change in our own society. Abel Ortiz, Policy Advisor, Office of the Governor, spoke on Governor Perdue’s behalf, congratulating Georgia’s innovations in its powerful peer initiatives.
As I studied the earnest faces of the audience I felt the room as one straining toward a vision some can only partially articulate—an idea with a newborn language. It seemed to me that the room was full of more than the actual assembly, but also with the ghosts of who we once were as a people who carry a diagnosis. I imagined that the faces of countless more of us appeared and disappeared in the minds of the assembled Doctors and Health Care Professionals as the day progressed and words and terms once used with such certainty like “hopeless,” “no reasonable expectation of success,” “limited,” “low functioning,” became questionable assumptions –artifacts of a system that we now know can not truly serve our potential, does not know that recovery must happen in the context of community and catalyzed by assuming or re-assuming valued roles in our society. The peer movement is all about relationships, the opposite of isolation whose attendants are hopelessness and futility. Standing on new ground in an historic building I understood that we are all charged with re-examining our relationships to one another—and that we must serve recovery by reformulating those old relationships so that hope, possibility, strength, and self-direction are a consequence of what we do with each other, with ourselves, and with our Health Care Professionals.
Consumer leaders Charles Willis, a CPS and Director of the Self-Directed Recovery Project for the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network, and Ken Whiddon, President of American Work, each described the moment in their own lives in which they were called to take courageous action in owning recovery, and the actions necessary to take control once again of their own lives. Charles had been homeless on the streets of Atlanta and made the decision to join a mutual self help group. Ken took back his personal power by making one definitive choice, literally, to go to college despite dire predictions of failure. Each man eloquently documented the power of courageous action in his own life ignited by deeply felt refusal to accept despair and hopelessness as the natural consequence of their experience with mental illness.
The GA CPS Project is almost 4 years old now. Over 250 consumers with major mental illness have been trained and certified. Some of us have gone on to other lives, other careers, not because we failed as CPSs but because we could. Others of us continue the hard work: Implementing the Vision Statement set forth by the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health: “We envision a future when everyone with a mental illness will recover.” We as consumers/survivors/ex-patients are not alone. Those who said we can’t are breaking rank, stepping forward, saying with great sincerity, “What are the questions I need to ask Peer Specialists and consumers so that I can help in creating the future we must all live now?” Congratulations, Georgia!
Beth Filson, CPS
GA Certified Peer Specialist Project
