Rhonda Speight - I Found My Lion's Roar - Combining Peer Support and Open Dialogue
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Ronda "Ro" Speight is a mental health peer specialist and recovery advocate at the Mental Health Association of Westchester in Westchester County, New York. She is a person with lived experience with the psychiatric system and a trained co-facilitator in an innovative approach that combines peer support and principles of the Open Dialogue approach called Peer Supported (Partnered) Open Dialogue (POD). POD is currently being tested in a large randomized clinical trial in the UK.
Ro was a service recipient in the Parachute Program NYC, which provided mobile crisis services and implemented respite centers in New York City—combining Intentional Peer Support and Open Dialogue informed practices. The Parachute program was discontinued, but the peer respite model it introduced in New York continues to exist. Her engagement with peers in Parachute shaped her views on mental health care and inspired her to pursue a career as a peer specialist.
Identifying as a person of color, Ro was profoundly affected by her mother's professional success as a clinical social worker who holds a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is highly aware of the obstacles women of color face in society and brings a racial justice perspective to the highly innovative practice of Peer Supported (Partnered) Open Dialogue.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.2 | Hi, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Anna Florence, a postdoctoral associate |
| 0:19.5 | at the Yale program for recovery and community health, |
| 0:22.7 | and I'm also a science writer for Madden America. |
| 0:25.8 | Today, I'm very excited to sit down with Rhonda Rose Bate. |
| 0:29.9 | She's a human rights advocate in the psychiatric community and works as a mental health peer specialist and recovery advocate at the Mental Health Association of Westchester in Westchester County, New York. |
| 0:42.8 | She also is a trained facilitator and co-trainer for peer-supported open dialogue. Thank you so much for joining us today, Roe. |
| 0:51.5 | Thank you so much, Anna. It's great to be here. Wonderful. So my first |
| 0:58.1 | question to you is, so how did you become a peer? That is a loaded question. You know, |
| 1:08.4 | for me to answer that, gosh, I really had been going through a lot of, you know, |
| 1:14.5 | struggles throughout my childhood and young adulthood, finally having like my first hospitalization |
| 1:22.4 | in the end of, you know, my 20s. |
| 1:35.2 | And then I, you know, found myself in and out of hospitalizations and outpatient programs. |
| 1:47.5 | And then I finally landed on the parachute program once I moved to Harlem, New York, and really was struggling. |
| 1:57.4 | And so I was actually hospitalized, and someone from Parachute came into the inpatient unit and introduced the program to me. |
| 2:00.6 | And I was like, hmm, this sounds different. You know, |
| 2:04.1 | I heard things like social network meetings. I heard things like, you know, you'll have a say |
| 2:11.3 | in your services, that you're a part of the process. So all of that seemed new after several hospitalization. |
| 2:22.5 | So I definitely was interested once I heard about that. |
| 2:28.1 | And so after that particular hospitalization, I enrolled in Parachute and was a participant and really engaged with peers |
| 2:41.1 | for the first time and was blown away by just the boldness, the confidence, all of that. I work directly with a peer as a part of my |
| 2:59.1 | team. So I would meet with them weekly as well as see a therapist or whatever, you know, more traditional services. |
... |
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