The history has always been that the people with mental illnesses were seen as really not someone that could contribute to society. They were segregated. They were told what to do and where to go. So there really was a lot of discrimination and prejudice and not much effort opportunity for people with severe mental illnesses. Now we know that that’s been entirely inappropriate and really wrong way to go about helping people with severe mental illnesses.

What it did was we expected people to fail, we expected people to act sick and indeed they failed and acted sick. Now our expectations are very different for people and their expectations for themselves are very different. So we find more and people with severe mental illness recovering.

We really believe in our research that one of the best ways to learn about what is helpful is to ask the person you’re trying to help. That sounds so basic and so common sensical, but for years we never asked people with mental illness what was helpful. What about that particular session or intervention did you see or feel that that got you going or helped in your recovery? So we make that a big part of all our research is to talk to the people that we’re trying to help with a particular intervention.

Probably up to 1970 or 1980, we didn’t ask people with mental illnesses what they wanted. We felt we knew what they wanted. So we gave them what we thought they wanted. Our researchers ask people, ‘What do you want in order to recover. What do you need?’ And interestingly enough they said things like, a job, relationships. You know, decent place to live. Uh, back to school. All the things that anybody needs to live a good life.

I think diverting people that have committed petty crimes to the jail system is just replicating history. We used to have an institution. We used to have houses. Wherever we segregate people with mental illness we tried to. And it didn’t work, and it’s not going to work now… If we’re really about helping people recover we’ll develop relationships with people. We’ll teach them the skills they need. We’ll provide them with supports they need to make it. We figure out what their goals are. We’ll do a lot of different things other than putting them in a prison or the state hospitals or a poor house.

Around medication versus no medication, etc, really to me underlies, what is underlying that whole argument is choice. The people want the choice and the freedom to choose the types of medications and when and how much and so forth. And isn’t that what we all want? I don’t want to be told what medication to take for my illnesses. I want to have the opportunity to choose.

I’d like to make the case that if it’s good for the person who is recovering, then good things will happen after that… We need to help people recover because that’s what they deserve and that’s what should be provided, and then there will be some cost advantages too. But that’s not what I see this whole recovery initiative about. I say it’s doing what we should have done a long time ago.