Sue Bergeson
Thursday, December 20, 2007
This is the time of year when a lot of us reflect and take stock of the past 12 months. As I look back at 2007 from an organizational perspective, I see several national mental health trends that have emerged, such as the:
- Growing recognition of the effectiveness and importance of peer support
- Crucial need to address our military's mental health needs
- Expanded use of technology to provide more people with better access to information and resources
- Strong movement to win support in Congress for mental health parity, increased recognition and treatment of postpartum depression and Medicaid coverage for peer support services
- Newly-accepted idea of whole-health treatment-the idea that mental health must be treated as a fundamental component of overall physical health
- Gradual change in provider services toward a consumer-centered, recovery-oriented approach to treatment.
Below, I've summarized some of the programs and services DBSA built to prepare for, and address, these trends. While I start with support groups because they're core to our work, the rest are in no particular order of importance.
Growth in Peer-Led Support Groups
We had a 17.7% increase in chapters and an 18.6% increase in support groups. And groups all across the country are becoming more active than ever before. We've seen them do everything from offering new training classes like "Living Successfully with a Mood Disorder" to "Pathways to Recovery" to WRAP. They're also offering new services with, and for, hospitals so that people have a link back to the community during and after hospitalization. And support groups are doing more stigma-busting through local media campaigns like Depression is Real.
Peers as Providers
By now, many people have been trained through DBSA to become (and to be paid as) peer specialists in clinics, hospitals and state mental health systems. We're working on new types of peer programs, too: smoking cessation peer specialists, diet and weight peer specialists and peer specialists who help fellow consumers make the transition out of the hospital. We've been pushing legislation that helps fund these positions, offering technical assistance to groups wanting to start these programs and working on new career paths as well.
Veterans
Like everyone in the country, we're very worried about our military coming back from service in Afghanistan and Iraq experiencing PTSD and other mental illnesses. I learned recently in a meeting that 1.5 million men and women had been deployed to Iraq alone. Even though less than one-third of vets visit a mental health clinic within their first year back home, many VA clinics are saying they've already exceeded capacity.
This is an area of great concern, and DBSA has been advocating diligently in Washington for increased funding for peer support/specialist programs as one way to solve the problem. We've been tapped by many of the VA networks around the country to train recently returned vets to become peer specialists.
