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Success Stories
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Larry Fricks: For 13 years I served as the director of the office of consumer relations and recovery for Georgia's division of mental health, developmental disabilities and addictive diseases. In that capacity I experienced a major and an amazing system transformation.<br/><br/> Basically, we had invested heavily in a service called day treatment. We were billing about $45 million a year and we had 83 day treatments. And in 1999 we were able to introduce a new recovery service called peer support. And it was Medicaid billable. In fact this past year Georgia billed over $10 million for the service. <br/><br/> What we found incredible, was that we were able to compare people in day treatment and people in peer support. What we discovered is that people in peer support, in a randomized study, improved in three major areas: functionality, natural supports in the community, and skills enhancement. The subjects that were studied in day treatment had zero improvement on their individual service plan. There was no recovery improvement in those three categories.<br/><br/> Administrators discovered that the cost savings were in the millions of dollars. Peer support costs, on an average, $1000 per person per year. Day treatment costs, on an average, $6400 per person per year. It was a no-brainer. The state decided to spend more of its dollars on peer support - a service that was changing the system to strengths-based recovery, having real outcomes and saving a lot of money.<br/><br/> Lisa Goodale: There are a couple of people who have really led the way when it comes to researching how effective peer specialist programs are. Dr. Matt Chinman has done some great work while based in Connecticut and, later, California. Dr. Chinman has worked with DBSA on several projects and has done a lot of work within the Veterans Administration. His work suggests that consumer-providers, peer specialists, seem to bring about either outcomes that are either better than, or equal to, the outcomes that traditional, non-consumer mental health professionals provide. He's also done some other great research on the different roles that consumer-providers can play … how they provide support by being a sounding board … how they model the possibility of recovery … how they help peers reintegrate in the community … and how they serve as a two-way link between the mental health system and the patient.<br/><br/> Dr. Jean Campbell from the Missouri Institute of Mental Health has done some great work as well. She has studied peer-run support programs all over the country. One of her own research projects shows that the stigmatizing attitude among providers contributes to the poor well-being of clients. It also shows that peer support promotes well-being. We've got a lot of other heroes out there who continually work to show what our constituents already know from experience … that, for many people with mental health challenges, peer support is an important ingredient in the wellness recipe.
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