"Progress Only Occurs when People Make Demands" Paolo del Vecchio Reflects on a Life of Federal Service
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Paulo del Vecchio is a person in long-term recovery from mental health and addictions, who has been a leader in the peer recovery movement for 40 years. He recently completed a 30-year career at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, where he served in multiple roles including the director of the Center for Mental Health Services and the founding director of the Office of Recovery.
Paolo is now an independent advocate, working to advance recovery-oriented policies and practices on national and international levels.
In this interview, he speaks with Mad in America's Leah Harris about his roots as a housing justice activist to his decades of public service at SAMHSA, what worries him most about mental health in today's America, and where he sees hope in the recovery movement that he helped create.
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A full transcript of this interview can be found here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/06/progress-only-occurs-when-people-make-demands-paolo-del-vecchio/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.3 | My name is Leah Harris. Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. Today's guest is Paolo Del Vecchio. |
| 0:22.6 | Paolo is a person in long-term recovery from mental health and addictions and has been a leader in the peer recovery movement for 40 years. |
| 0:31.1 | He recently completed a 30-year career at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health |
| 0:38.8 | Services Administration, where he served in multiple roles, including the director of the Center |
| 0:44.7 | for Mental Health Services and the founding director of the Office of Recovery. |
| 0:50.2 | Paolo is now an independent advocate working to advance recovery-oriented policies and practices on national and international levels. |
| 1:00.8 | Welcome, Paolo. So glad to have you join us today. |
| 1:04.3 | Thank you, Leia. It's an honor to be here. |
| 1:06.5 | It's an honor to have you. And I'm wondering if you can start off by talking to us about how |
| 1:13.1 | you got involved in the field of mental health, any of your early activism and lived |
| 1:18.3 | experiences, movement reflections, or anything you want to share about your entry into this |
| 1:24.9 | work. I'll just start with a little bit about my story and again, |
| 1:31.0 | stories are the basis of what peer recovery movement is all about. And so my story began as a child, |
| 1:39.8 | like many of us. I grew up in a family that knew mental health and addictions intimately. |
| 1:46.5 | My mom, who I consider the heroin in my life, was someone who was stayed hospitalized multiple times during her life. |
| 1:54.0 | She was someone who was subject to the evidence-based practices of the day, including forced insulin shock treatment. |
| 2:00.6 | She went on to raise four kids by herself, got a graduate degree in philosophy. practices of the day, including forced insulin shock treatment. |
| 2:01.0 | She went on to raise four kids by herself, got a graduate degree in philosophy, taught for |
| 2:06.1 | many years in local community college, nationally published poet, my number one champion. |
| 2:14.3 | My dad was a Korean war vet, and he didn't talk much about his battlefield experiences, |
| 2:21.3 | but dealt with it through the bottle. |
... |
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