I found this read to be quite interesting.It seems to bring to point what I personally
feel about “Spirituality” being such a vital part of mental health recovery,
substance abuse recovery and even recovery from/through life in general.What do you think?
For our staff meeting next week, CCSR personnel are reading an article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review by John Kania and Mark Kramer on “Collective Impact” (PDF, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011). We hope to have a productive discussion about what it means related to our philosophy and strategies for our work with organizations and coalitions.
Kania and Kramer define collective impact as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” (p. 36). These actors include funders, government officials, representatives from key agencies, individuals, and others. While the regular gathering of such a mix of people could be referred to as a coalition or collaboration, collective impact initiatives go beyond this by including “a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants” (p. 38). What the authors argue is that, for some issues--including what the Kansas Leadership Center refers to as deep, daunting challenges--it’s not enough for one nonprofit organization to try to intervene for the better. Some issues require the engagement of nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public to create real and lasting change.
Five-level social ecological model
Scott Wituk, our Director, often refers to the social ecological model, where four embedded circles indicate the scope of potential intervention from the individual in the center to the relationship to the community to the society at large. This comes out of the Centers for Disease Control’s work to prevent intimate partner violence, which is work Scott has partnered with the CDC on.
When CCSR considers this model, we see that our work in leadership development and certified peer counselor training impacts individuals. Our work with organizations affects the institutional level of the five circle version of the model. Often when we work with coalitions or collaborative efforts we engage with many different agencies within a sector, hoping to impact society at large.
What Kania and Kramer suggest is that there is a role for an organization—perhaps one like ours? or like yours?—to become a “Backbone Support Organization.” This would be an organization that consists of at least a project manager, data manager, and a facilitator. The people in these roles manage the overall change effort.
Some questions related to this article for CCSR--and your organization!--to consider:
What is our past experience? Have any of the big projects we’ve been a part of met the key features of a collective impact initiative?
What are the issue areas we want to see progress on? For which issues are we willing to be significantly involved in managing a collective impact initiative?
How could we increase our impact at the society level of the social ecological model?
Has your organization discussed these questions? What conclusions did you come to? Let us know in the comments below.
Our organization plans to discuss this article more next week. Look for a follow up blog post with some details on our conversation.
A problem-solving tool we teach in the Certified Peer Specialist 5-Day Basic Training involves, among other things, looking how a person is negatively impacting his own problem, asking how one’s actions or beliefs may be exacerbating that problem or preventing it from being solved. This is an aspect of problem-solving we tend to shy away from or ignore.
I suspect that’s because doing so brings us into contact with all sorts of things we don’t want to hear. Brainstorming practical solutions makes us feel effective; looking at our own role in causing a problem can make us feel uncomfortable. Coming up with solutions might change the way we act in the short term, until the immediate effects of the problem seem to be alleviated. But examining how we’re contributing to a problem may force us to change who we are and what we believe—and that has implications for the long term.
Indeed, fostering long-term solutions is exactly why we examine what we are doing to create and perpetuate problems. How many “solutions” have been implemented, their effects measured, and congratulations extended to those involved, only to have the effects reversed by a new set of problems or another bout of the same old thing? We see examples of this everywhere, from weight loss programs that fail to address our basic attitudes about exercise and food to military “victories” that precede the chaos of a failed state. To admit to how we are negatively impacting a problem is to admit that we are flawed. But to do so is also to take responsibility for a problem, or at least for that part of the problem that is under our control.
For individuals, this might mean measuring our espoused values against the beliefs we express through our actions: I may agree that the local coffee shop wastes an appalling number of paper cups, but my own vanity may prevent me from bringing my battered travel mug in for a refill.
For an organization, taking stock of what it’s doing that contributes to a problem could force an accounting of institutional values for the first time—and that might reveal how incoherent or contradictory those values really are. For instance (and to keep a theme alive), the desire to stock the office break room with pricey fair trade coffee might go against the value of keeping operating costs low.
But this also reveals the power of reviewing our own negative impacts: the organization might decide that the value of doing right by the grower of the coffee beans outweighs the value of cost-effectiveness in this case. Confronted with the values underlying the impacts, a person or organization is empowered to act intentionally. And sometimes, through reviewing how we negatively impact a problem, we may realize that it’s not actually a problem, and that the proper solution is no action at all.
When you hear the word “medicine,” you probably think of a bottle full of pills. This is the experience for most of us when we have a physical ailment, and it is often the experience when we have a psychiatric ailment as well. Whatever your views on the “medicalization” of psychiatric diagnoses, pills don’t treat the whole person. And since we’re all different, a whole person approach must be unique to the individual, a “personal” medicine.
One promoter of personal medicine is Pat Deegan, a mental health consumer and psychologist, who developed a workshop of video presentations and workbook activities called Common Ground to help get mental health consumers in touch with their own personal medicine and to help them personalize their medication experience.
Nancy Jensen, a Certified Peer Specialist and member of the CPS training team at the Center for Community Support and Research, is both a user of and tireless advocate for the Common Ground curriculum. Nancy came across Common Ground after joining CCSR. “I found myself not wanting to go back to where I was before,” she says, but initially dismissed Common Ground as “just another workbook.” What she discovered was a program for empowering mental health consumers.
Nancy had been an “aggressive” consumer, one who insisted the provider “had to do it my way.” She says an empowered consumer, on the other hand, allows the provider to have expertise but not to take away the consumer’s control over her own life and medication. Common Ground, Nancy explains, puts forward that there are two experts in the room: the provider and the consumer.
Key to this is the “power statement,” a statement the consumer uses to express to her provider what she wants out of treatment, what parts of her life she won’t let treatment interfere with. The power statement is formed around personal medicine: the things in life that make one feel good, and feel good about life. For Nancy at that time, that was working and taking care of her cat.
Another important part of Common Ground that Nancy finds powerful is the idea that emotions are not symptoms. Often, those with psychiatric diagnoses (and sometimes their doctors and loved ones) are so used to seeing what they feel as aspects of illness that they lose sight of the fact that emotions are a natural part of life, genuine reactions to one’s life and the direction it’s going.
These tools not only help people recover, they help people avoid the “medication trap,” where the side effects of a medication keep one from pursuing personal medicine, but the lack of medication exacerbates symptoms, also preventing one from pursuing personal medicine. Common Ground advocates "trade-offs” between personal and pill medicine, and the use of power statements to help providers understand the need to help people do those things that make their lives worthwhile.
Nancy points out that not just pill medication can lead one into the medication trap; therapy can too. She also stresses that the ideas of personal medicine and power statements can be useful for anybody, not just those with psychiatric diagnoses.
CCSR Peer Educator Christine Young recently received an e-newsletter from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which is the national government's behavioral health administration, that promoted its online outreach work.
Increasing Outreach, Feedback, and Virtual Communities
Facebook. YouTube. Twitter. Blogs. In response to President Obama's request for Open Government, SAMHSA has developed a robust “digital engagement” program with established presences on four major social media channels. At the center of it all, SAMHSA's blog serves as the hub for these behavioral-health-focused efforts and expands SAMHSA's connections across the Nation.
Christine notes, "This opens access to so many more people. There need to be responsible concerns about security and having personal information out there, but I think services that are being provided need to evolve with the times."
Lael Ewy adds, "As a way of hitting people where they are, SAMHSA is doing the right thing. The interactive blog is a great idea as well: open government becomes responsive government in that case, and that’s really what we want it to be, especially when the issues and policies are complex."
Spirituality in Recovery is a thought or vision I received many years ago, and still use today. I had no idea that I would now be taking on the awesome task of putting Spirituality to pen, paper, and/or computer to teach and share with many others as a Certified Peer Specialist (CPS)/Peer Educator here at WSU Center for Community Support & Research.
A CPS/Peer Educator is someone who has a desire, mission and purpose to help others through many of life’s experiences towards recovery by sharing, showing and teaching. I’m one of 4 who are on staff at CCSR. We all have different experiences that we bring to our work.
For me, this journey has been enlightening, challenging and awesome all at the same time. I have found a wealth of information via the internet websites, i.e., colleges, organizations, professors, doctors and other individuals who simply had a thought or opinion and shared with the world. An example is David Lukoff, PhD, a founder and instructor offering an online continuing education course and quiz about Spirituality & Recovery from Mental Disorder on the Spiritual Competency Resource Center website.
Hopefully, with what I have learned and put to paper will “help somebody”--my life’s purpose. Glory!
“Glory!” is one of the first words you’re likely to hear Dorthene “Dee” Hinton-Turner say. It’s not just an expression but a way Dee sees the world. Dee is inspired with a sense of mission and purpose. It’s this that drives her to help others, first as a Certified Peer Specialist, and now as a Peer Educator training CPSs at CCSR.
But Dee’s desire to help is not new; it goes back to her childhood, to singing Mahalia Jackson’s classic “If I Can Help Somebody” in church:
If I can help somebody
As I travel along
If I can help somebody
With a word or song
If I can help somebody
From doing wrong
My living shall not be in vain.
Dee was not sure what shape that help would take until she began a relationship with Southwest Boulevard Family Healthcare in Kansas City, Kansas. Here, Dee discovered the power of peer support in her own life, and knew that, as she says “This is it!” The spirit had led her on a path to become a CPS and help others as she had been helped.
Dee set her professional sights on two targets, Rainbow Mental Health Center or KU Medical Center in Kansas City, persisting in her attempts to land a job as a CPS at these organizations. When she finally got in at Rainbow, “Oh my goodness!” she found the healing power of helping others works both ways: “Being a CPS is personal medicine for me,” according to Dee. “There wasn’t a lot of leadership or instruction” at Rainbow, she notes, so Dee could use her peers’ own needs to help empower them. This in turn helped foster in Dee a sense of her own independence and personal power. At the end of a day at Rainbow, Dee was “thoroughly exhausted,” but felt rewarded and fulfilled.
In the words of “If I Can Help Somebody,”
My living shall not be in vain
My living shall not be in vain
If I can help somebody
While I'm singing this song
My living shall not be in vain.
Dee’s experiences as a CPS were not in vain. Some days, she went into work “uncertain if a discussion topic [she selected] would work,” but when it did, the negative self-talk common to psychiatric diagnosis dissolved, uplifting both the peer seeking services and peer support worker alike. In small, profound ways, her work was made up of many acts of faith.
That faith’s solid foundation and the role of spirituality in her life make Dee think of herself as “The Spiritual CPS,” and her goals as a Peer Educator include exploring the relationship between spirituality and recovery from psychiatric diagnosis. “My being at WSU is not by chance,” she says, but an opportunity to learn and develop even more helping skills, part of her vision to “strike out and know more.”
And in that there is the glory of empowering others to live lives that are not in vain.
