Shery Mead had her first encounter with the mental health system as a teenager. It was a time when most people were over-medicated, shock treatments were routine, and when no one even asked about trauma and abuse. She was offered life in a halfway house and a limited future. Needless to say, it was not much to look forward to. Shery began, instead, to put her creative energy into music, allowing her to “say that which could not be said.”

Though this worked reasonably well for a number of years, the deep shame, fear, powerlessness and sense of “otherness” finally caught back up with her and she ended up back in the system. Neither the culture nor the prognoses had changed much. She fell into leading the life of a “mental patient.”

Finally when loss of custody of her children was threatened (based simply on psychiatric diagnosis), she decided she’d had enough. It was then that she realized that she and many others had a choice; the choice of saying “no more.” She started a peer organization whose focus was specifically “unlearning the mental patient role.”

Everything changed after that. She developed training for judges and lawyers about making reasonable custody decisions in cases where one parent has a psychiatric diagnosis, she developed groups for women trauma survivors using music to speak out, she created NH’s first peer run crisis respite program, and she started training mental health professionals. Shery now speaks at many conferences and trains locally and nationally. Her current interests include:

• Peer support as social action and social change
• The development and implementation of trauma informed peer programs and groups
• Narrative and participatory evaluation and research
• Peer run crisis alternatives
• Training professionals in recovery based practices

Shery has just finished co-authoring a book with Mary Ellen Copeland, Wellness Recovery Action Planning and Peer Support: Personal, Group, and Program Development. She has also written a manual for different kinds of peer programs and groups including the NY Peer Bridger Program.

Shery Mead Consulting