Featured Member: Howard D. Trachtman

My name is Howard D. Trachtman, and I was honored in May at the 2016 Recovery Workforce Summit  in Boston with the Isaiah Uliss Award. While I never met Izzy, I understand he was a fantastic advocate and many people at the conference knew him. I wanted to share a little bit about my philosophy and some reasons I may have been selected for the award.

I am a Certified Peer Specialist and a Certified Psychosocial Rehabilitation Practitioner. I believe that recovery is not only possible but is a fundamental right! I have devoted my energies towards making this a reality.  It's my belief that peer-run services – that is services designed and implemented by people with psychiatric conditions and/or addictions – are to be recommended and funded even more than they are now. People with mental health issues are people first and want and deserve the same quality of life as everyone else. We want a nice place to live, meaningful daytime activity, and positive relationships both platonic and romantic.

I've benefited from many of the staff I've worked with and also through my spirituality.  But what has helped me the most has been what I've learned from my peers who are also in recovery. Every person with a psychiatric condition is unique and deserves individualized care and supports.  This treatment must be person centered, not program centered.

I've also found that advocating for the needs of people with psychiatric disabilities like myself has given meaning to my life and helped me develop skills to go back to work. I got my start in the peer recovery movement through M-POWER (Massachusetts People/Patients Organized for Wellness Empowerment and Rights, www.m-power.org).  As I was mentor by people in M-POWER in doing direct action work, running business meetings, and being on non-profit boards of directors. I now mentor others to do the same.

I got involved with NAMI the National Alliance on Mental Illness to amplify the peer voice within NAMI at the national, state, and local level and to bring signature programs to Massachusetts. Now we have the In Our Own Voice program which is a paid speaker's bureau conducted by people in recovery, NAMI Connection support groups and the PEER to PEER educational classes. I co-founded the NAMI Greater Boston Consumer Advocacy Network (www.namigbcan.org) which is primarily people in recovery. I have chaired for over a decade the NAMI Advisory Committee on Restraint and Seclusion trying to end this torture and maintain a website at www.RestraintFreeWorld.org

I also believe that people who have experienced a psychiatric condition are the best people to provide services to others.  We've "been there" and "done that." We have experiences to draw on that many professional staff don't have. Peer support lines (sometimes called warmlines) provide a confidential and compassionate listening ear and are a great example of a peer-operated service. I maintain a directory of them at www.warmline.org. Additionally, peer-run respites where people can recover at their own pace are rapidly growing around the country.

In Massachusetts, the state mental health authority funds six Recovery Learning Communities.  Recovery Learning Communities are all peer-run and provide custom peer support in local communities. I co-founded the Boston Resource Center at Boston Medical Center, and now BMC holds the contracts for both the Metro Boston Recovery Learning Community and the Southeast Recovery Learning Community and serve on the leadership team of both. We also have the Opening Doors to the Arts program where we receive $100,000 worth of complimentary concert and theater tickets for peers.

I co-authored the chapter "From Within: A Consumer Perspective on Psychiatric Hospitals" published in the Textbook of Hospital Psychiatry.

In the 1990's when peers working in human services were afraid of losing their jobs if their own mental illness was discovered, I would attend a monthly dinner. When the restaurant closed, the group stopped. I saw value in the networking dinner and revived the group as the TWOHATS dinner (www.twohats.org).

I did want to talk more about why I am passionate about ending restraint and seclusion. A number of years ago, one of my best friends was placed in restraints shortly after admission to a private hospital and consequently he died in those restraints on his 36th birthday. The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors has a position statement on seclusion and restraint on its website www.nasmhpd.org. The members of the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) believe that seclusion and restraint, including "chemical restraints," are safety interventions of last resort and are not treatment interventions. Seclusion and restraint should never be used for the purposes of discipline, coercion, or staff convenience, or as a replacement for adequate levels of staff or active treatment."

I've experienced restraint and seclusion during several of my private hospitalizations, frequently immediately after admission, when I needed the support and human contact of caring staff the most.  I can tell you that this is not a treatment – it's torture, plain and simple. For those with a trauma history, which is most patients, it is extremely re-traumatizing. Restraint and seclusion is also over-used in our schools and nursing homes.

Restraint and seclusion reduction and elimination can happen. The Allentown State Hospital in Pennsylvania became the first hospital in the nation to eliminate the use of seclusion and decreased the use of mechanical restraint from 19,694 hours in 1994 to 133 hours total in 1999.  Staff injuries also plummeted as a direct consequence. I urge those people to learn to replicate this process in state funded and privately operated hospitals around the country.