Clinical Director, Health and Wellness Center | Clinical Professor, Family and Community Medicine
In my roles as a community psychologist, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a psychiatric rehabilitation practitioner and educator, I’ve been able to work in and study both the professional-help and the mutual-help paradigms. Before coming to Arizona in 2011 I practiced for many years as an independent psychotherapist and organizational consultant with a transactional epistemology and a family systems orientation, acquired in part from my graduate training at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In that role, I had the unusual opportunity to be involved as an ally for three-and-a-half decades in the mental health consumer movement, perhaps best characterized as “nothing about us without us.” This movement, often likened to other liberation movements such as those empowering women, people of color, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities, has had a natural outgrowth in the emergence of peer supporters or peer specialists as a growing part of the behavioral health workforce, especially in public mental health systems. Sometimes calling themselves consumer/survivor/ex-patients, these people with lived experience of mental illness and addiction are now taking their place alongside traditionally-trained human service providers, using their personal stories of recovery to help others move forward on their journeys. They are being recognized increasingly as members of a legitimate helping discipline—peer supporters–and indeed the work they do is being acknowledged by researchers as an emerging best practice. I’ve often served as a bridge-builder and a kind of translator between the lay and professional communities, and—coming from the northeast and drawn to numerous forms of diversity–I’ve been privileged to be accepted as a colleague, a helper, and an ally by people in marginalized and stigmatized populations--not only folks with serious mental illnesses (SMI), but also people with HIV/AIDS, and those who self-identify as ethnic, racial and sexual minorities. That has always been a specialty niche within my clinical practice, and here in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, I am able to work collegially with peer-supporters, practice integrated health with people who have SMI, and supervise wonderful family medicine residents in their communication skills and their attunement to the behavioral health issues which inevitably arise with their clinic patients. I also maintain a small psychotherapy practice in town, and have been welcomed into the larger Arizona psychology and psychiatric rehabilitation communities in a way which left no doubts that leaving New Jersey for the desert southwest was one of the wisest decsions that my wife and I ever made. We are also quite fortunate in that both of our grown children now live in the Denver area, and our visits with them and our two grandchildren are among the greatest joys of our almost 50-year life together