Shery Mead

Shery 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 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 could say 'no more.'

Soon after, Shery:

• Started a peer organization whose focus was specifically "unlearning the mental patient role"
• Went back to school and studied systems theory
• Began to understand how people had gotten stuck in less than empowering roles
• Developed training that offered people the tools that led to rich, vibrant, mutual relationships
• Created the first peer-run crisis respite program

You can read more of Shery’s story in her article, IPS: A Personal Retrospective.