I spent my professional life as a teacher in special education. Along the way, my own boy got sick with a serious mental illness and I became a student again. Here is what I have distilled out so far: Any treatment for mental illness to improve and empower the future for those who are ill must first address healing of the person who got sick.

I am a family speaker as part of Voices Of Recovery from Portland, Maine. At a recent engagement was an amazing woman who worked with homeless folks with mental illness. She had one client who [was difficult], until one day, someone told her to ask the woman to show her pictures – so she did. What came out was the history of this person preceding her illness, and the journey toward trust began.

Change in the mainstream dynamic about treatment and care of those suffering from mental illness will require an emphasis on hearing what happened to those who got sick and to their families. It will require acknowledgement and welcome of what is known by those who have walked the walk, with the experts choosing families and consumers as their guides. My pragmatic ideas are these:

• Create a movement that advocates for requiring that primary sources be included in the curriculum of those preparing to work in the mental health field.
• Create momentum for those in the field to generate qualitative research proposals from the content analysis etc. of these primary sources.
• Conduct quantitative research that stems from these proposals, with the goal of developing best practices in healing and recovery from mental illness.