Incorporating people with lived experience of recovery in the mental health system means allowing many who are also diagnosed with various DSM 'disorders' to rethink their practice and perhaps even come out of hiding. "Peers" know the value of human rights, too and the illness producing effect of lack thereof.
I am hoping SAMSHA also can face the contributions of some types of psychotropic medications to metabolic syndrome and early death. I am hoping SAMSHA does the brave thing of supporting those psychiatrist who try to address this issue through addressing polypharmacology and medication reduction. As one who has been on long term psychotropics (fourteen years or so) and gained over 100 lbs. I can attest to the fact that this needs to be addressed. I have been off them for about six years now with no ill effect. We need to study why it is that some, like me, can go on with their lives without them and apply those lessons.

Over 70% of primary care visits involve behavioral health concerns concurrent to medical issues. In addition the majority of persons with common psychiatric disorders such as depression are seen in primary care settings. Co-location of behavioral health providers in primary care settings offers significant advantages over traditionally separated treatment systems.

Large healthcare systems have begun to realize the promise of integrated behavioral health (for example, the VA, Cherokee Health Systems, Group Health); and the field is responding with ways to meet the training needs of an integrated behavioral health workforce through such innovative programs as the Certificate in Integrated Primary at U.Mass, and the Doctor of Behavioral Health degree at Arizona State University.

Established by Congress in 2000, and funded by the Center for Mental Health Services at SAMHSA, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) is a unique collaboration of academic and community-based service centers whose mission is to raise the standard of care and increase access to services for traumatized children and their families across the United States.
Since the launch of the NCTSN:
1. Hundreds of thousands of children have received effective, culturally sensitive, evidence-based assessment and treatment for child traumatic stress.
2. Nearly a million providers have been trained in best practices.
3. Family members and consumers have offered valuable input to ensure
that treatment addresses the real needs of families and is responsive to
their concerns.
4. Data from more than 14,000 children treated by the NCTSN have provided
an unprecedented portrait of child trauma in America; this information is
used to improve care and shape national child policies.
5. Innovative and engaging new learning models, such as the NCTSN Learning
Collaborative, ensure that changes in practice take hold and are sustained
in service agencies across the country.
6. The NCTSN Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma has identified the most
important principles of trauma treatment across theoretical models
and disciplines. It has become a model in the field for innovative trauma education.

As a Certified Peer Support Specialist in North Carolina, I would say that my positive, sustaining, and rewarding work in the state-funded mental health system encompasses many of the incredibly positive changes that have taken place in formal structures of care. I facilitate recovery education classes, such as the Evidence-based Practices of Mary Ellen Copeland's WRAP and Wellness Management Recovery. The students that participate at the Recovery Education Center often enter our doors in a state of crisis. They are some of the bravest and most resilient people I have ever known. Having access to Peer Support and to positive curricula that were created by or with the help of people with lived experience creates a learning environment characterized by strengths, humanity, and validation of the worth of one's experience. Countless expensive and traumatic hospitalizations have been avoided, lives have been saved. As someone with 23 years of experience as a "consumer" in "the mental health system" I have had the gift of an opportunity to shift my thinking about myself. I am not a Patient anymore. I am a Peer. I think my own recovery began with that shift in perspective.

There is, of course, so much work to be done still. However, there is HOPE.