| The Story of Dreamweaver’s Peer Support Dreamweaver’s was nothing more than a thought in the back of my head five years ago. Long before I had the courage to become what I am today, a person who believes that people deserve the best quality of care from other people and who want to take back their lives and are willing to do it with a vengeance. Five years ago I didn’t know that this would become a full- fledged organization to do so today. My experiences with the mental health system, both good and bad, have driven me to take on what was a system that was full of mediocrity and make it something more for my peers. I have been the product of inpatient research, outpatient day treatment and psychiatric housing providers in New York City. I have seen what peers can do when empowered and how the system can disempower the same people and make them dependent on a system that doesn’t always work. I wanted the disempowerment of my peers to stop. I wanted change. So it started one night, several months back. I was laying in bed with my partner and I was moaning and complaining of the lack of good providers in our area. Then I started on the mediocrity among "peers", "providers" and "peer-providers" who seemed so willing to do mediocrity and "peer organizations" that seemed to want to whine and complain about everything. I was tired of a lack of responsibility that peers and peer organizations had to do with their own recovery. It appeared to me as if everything they wanted should be handed to them on a silver platter. At that time my home was becoming well known to everyone as a place to bring their problems. It seemed as if the work that I had chosen to do with my life never ever stopped. It followed me and at the time, kept turning up like a bad penny. I just couldn’t get away from the “office” to enjoy my down time. Everywhere I went, I ended up running into another peer who needed some sort of help. Me being myself, I offered not only my services but those of my partner and my best friend. Among the three of us we could just about manage most things. Even though I learned many great lessons along the way, Joann and D.K. kept saying that I needed my own office and apartment complex because I kept bringing home “strays” who needed our help. Though this time I wanted to be at the top of the food chain. I wanted to do it my way, which meant no mediocrity, no settling, nothing but the best for people. During my time as a human lab rat, from 1994 to 1995 at the New York State Psychiatric Institute on its inpatient unit, I worked with the world’ s best in providers and found they didn’t settle for mediocrity. I also discovered that I began to demand more of providers and peers and fell back in love with the profession that I had long respected. I became a treatment snob and wouldn’t settle for less than the best out of my providers. Upon moving to Utica, New York and realizing the desolation of Central New York, I realized how much information and disinformation that peers had at their disposal and the lack of knowing their rights. I was laying in bed with my partner one night, crying about missing the City, more so because of the excellence of providers and peer organizations in the City who chose to provide services to peers who were not yet empowered and who had not been taught skills. There was a distinct lack of this kind of organization in Central New York. I had been looking at my partner’s dreamcatcher, we have several in the house, and then I thought about, I who am Iroquois Indian, began to think about, “What about Dreamweaver’s.” So immediately Joann chimed in, with her eighteen years of customer service, began with a series of possible names and she started using the name as though she were answering the phone. It was finally she who said, “Hello, Dreamweaver’s Peer Support. This is Joann, how can I help you?” That’s how Dreamweaver’s got its name. We pondered and spoke to several people about opening a 501(c)(3). At that point I already was a peer advocate, a graduate of Howie T. Harp and a graduate of New York Westchester Rockland Advocacy Coalition and running my own DBT peer support group online through Yahoo! Groups. As I began to ponder all I was doing, I realized it was time for me to strike out on my own. It was time for me to make my own way, pay my own dues and take whatever lumps and lessons I had to learn along the way. I also had been fortunate enough to act as the intern for the Director of Recipient Affairs with New York State Office of Mental Health. I currently sit on OMH’s Recipient Advisory Committee for Central New York and am a White Paper Trainer and presenter. So it was time for me to put up or shut up, as they say. I had, however, one critical piece missing and that was someone who could handle my mind that races a million miles an hour and who could take my dictation and make actual fluid sentences of what I was saying. This is where D.K. came into play, her having the legal knowledge and ability to decipher my “morse code.” It is actually she that made sense of what I was saying. When she moved up from the City, with me and Joann, the three of us being spoiled treatment snobs, it became far more important that we put our heads together and decided what to do. So with what little money that I could scrape together and with the help of some very friendly attorneys and a lot of peer support who thought along the same lines that I did, Dreamweavers became more than a dream, it became a reality. Dreamweaver’s is supposed to be the best of the best. It is supposed be the creme de la creme of peer organizations. My dream is to make Dreamweaver’s the one true organization that I admire. Not peer- providers and not providers but a people first organization that rises above mediocrity. So, it is my hope that Dreamweaver’s Peer Support will one day have the respect earned among peers as an organization meant to help people. |
