On Our Own, Together: Peer Programs for People with Mental Illness

Chapter 10: BRIDGES in Tennessee: Building Recovery of Individual Dreams and Goals through Education and Support

10 BRIDGES in Tennessee: Building Recovery of Individual Dreams and Goals through Education and Support Louetta Hix Consumers often ask, “How do you run an education and support program that helps mental health consumers progress toward a more fulfilling life?” The BRIDGES Education and Support program is an answer to that question. The original BRIDGES program was started in Tennessee in 1995, and within five years had expanded to eight other states and one Canadian province. The program consists of two parts. The first provides a fifteen-week course on mental illness, mental health treatment, and recovery, taught by consumers to consumers. The second offers ongoing support groups facilitated by consumers who have been trained in the BRIDGES method. With the BRIDGES program, consumers find that we are not alone in our struggles. BRIDGES offers us hope, state-of-the-art information, and a chance to help others and to be helped in return. The program empowers us to make changes that we desire in our lives, particularly in respect to mental health treatment and discovery of meaning and purpose. These are powerful themes, for they strike deep in the hearts of many who participate in the program. History of BRIDGES in Tennessee BRIDGES was formed in response to constant requests from consumers across Tennessee for accurate information on the causes and treatments of mental illnesses as well as strategies on coping with their effects and a way of connecting with others who would understand. In 1994, three groups joined in a collaborative effort to respond to these requests for help. These groups were the Tennessee Mental Health Consumers’ AssociOnOurOwnFinalPages .indd฀฀฀197 4/16/05฀฀฀6:10:44฀PM 198 On Our Own Together: Educational Programs ation, NAMI-Tennessee, and the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, who, respectively, represented consumers , families, and mental health providers. The state agency obtained a grant from the federal Center for Mental Health Services to develop a peer-run consumer education and support program modeled on the Journey of Hope, an education and support program piloted in Tennessee that targeted family members of persons with mental illnesses. Some of this process is described in the book Back from Wherever I’ve Been by Sita Diehl and Beth Baxter (2000), two of the founders of the new BRIDGES program. Other founders who worked in this collaborative process were Cynthia Barker, Darryl Hubbard, Irene Russell, and Christy Talley. Soon many others signed on to help form this program, making it a creative product of many contributors. Based on information obtained through face-to-face interviews and focus groups with 140 consumers statewide, we learned that consumers want basic facts about psychiatric diagnosis and medications and information about how to identify their own needs and how to access mental health resources, and about dimensions of recovery. Armed with the information about what consumers want to know, we recruited individual consumer experts to contribute to the BRIDGES curriculum. The BRIDGES classes were piloted in 1995 in three communities of diverse sizes from East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Responses from teachers, students, service providers, and family members were enthusiastic . The curriculum was then revised in response to feedback from piloting and reviewers, and from course and teacher evaluations. The following were excerpts from evaluations: • BRIDGES gave me more information and encouragement in one course about mental illness and recovery than [I have learned] in thirty years of attempting to learn through the mental health system. • With BRIDGES, we finally know we are not alone, that we can get clear information and we can help each other. • This course addresses the isolation that our illness forces upon us with a level of social bonding that I never expected to find, and do not find in any other area of my life. As the program got started, the demand for classes was tremendous. People were eager to participate in classes and equally eager to assume OnOurOwnFinalPages.indd฀฀฀198 4/16/05฀฀฀6:10:44฀PM BRIDGES in Tennessee 199 the meaningful work of teaching (Diehl and Baxter 2000). As of spring 2000, BRIDGES had held sixty-eight classes in twenty-nine Tennessee communities and had expanded to nine states and provinces. The support group component of BRIDGES was initiated in the spring of 1996 and has likewise enjoyed an enthusiastic response. The BRIDGES method provides a clear, concise structure for facilitating support...