Lori Ashcraft, PhD, CPRP

During her 40 year behavioral health career, Lori has had a strong interest in the therapeutic effects of self-determination, choice, and personal freedom. She did her dissertation on freedom, spending a month in Russia at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and focused her inquiry in Soviet mental hospitals, where the lack of freedom and choice was pervasive.

After a full career in California that included the Deputy Director for Community Programs of state Department of Mental Health, she re-located to Arizona where she accepted the position as Director for Adult Services for the Regional Behavioral Health Authority and served as a professor for the University of Arizona teaching psycho-social rehabilitation and managing one of eight SAMHSA funded employment demonstration programs. It was during this time that Lori became involved in the recovery movement. Through training with Mary Ellen Copeland and help from colleagues at Boston University, her commitment to recovery principles became a passion. When META Services (now Recovery Innovations), opened the Recovery Education Center in the fall of 2000, Lori accepted the position as Executive Director of the Center. Currently Lori is the Executive Director for the Recovery Innovations Recovery Opportunity Center.

Lori’s vision for the future is to continue teaching recovery principles and practices, assuring people that they can recover. She has developed several curricula designed to help individuals with psychiatric experiences move beyond recovery by finding their purpose, making their own unique contribution, and using their experiences to help others grow and recover. Her own passion for recovery stems from personal experience having struggled with severe depression most of her life.  Most of her time is spent writing books, developing training material and delivering presentations and trainings to help spread the word that recovery is proven and possible.