For the month of September, the Hogg Foundation is celebrating National Recovery Month. Throughout the month we’ll be highlighting the creativity, resilience, and leadership of people in recovery from mental and substance use conditions, and the many things our grantee partners are doing to transform mental health in their communities.

For this episode, we talk to two friends from within the Hogg Foundation’s wide network of changemakers. First, Jason Howell, executive director of RecoveryPeople, about the new film Humanly Possible, which explores the journeys of people recovering from substance use conditions. The film was produced with funding support from the Hogg Foundation. The second segment is a conversation with Hannah Slyzk, a past recipient of the Hogg Foundation’s Moore Fellowship for doctoral research, about youth mental health.

Related Links:

https://hogg.utexas.edu/recovery-month

https://recoverypeople.org/humanly-possible/premiere/

https://hogg.utexas.edu/rethinking-youth-suicide

Historically, the mental health system, and the conversation surrounding it, has given more value to the expert opinions of providers and clinicians than the experiences of those living with mental health conditions. For well over a decade now, the Hogg Foundation bas been elevating the visibility of mental health consumers and has thrown its full weight behind the peer support and recovery movement. But right at The University of Texas at Austin, there has been the full flowering of a peer support consumer specifically for students. Called Longhorn SHARE, it was launched in 2022 with the support of the University's Counseling and Mental Health Center. In this episode we talk to Adrian Lancaster, coordinator of Longhorn SHARE and a staunch advocate for student peer support.

• How Peer Support Improves Community Mental Health

• Peer Support in the Criminal Justice System

• Peer Support for Young Adults

• A New Mental Health App Comes to UT

Mental health care and recovery services have historically prioritized a clinical medical model. Under this model, expertise resided almost exclusively in the hands of professionally trained healthcare providers. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, however, a recovery model emerged that put greater emphasis on the self-determination of “consumers” of mental health services and the expertise of individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges.

This episode of Into the Fold was recorded onsite at PeerFest 2024 and guest hosted by Anna Gray and Janet Paleo. Anna and Janet are co-founders of Prosumers International, and Anna is also its executive director. Rooted in the belief that purposeful recovery is possible, Prosumers aims to create an empowering environment where people with mental health challenges can achieve recovery on their own terms.

Anna and Janet spoke with Dr. Octavio N. Martinez, Jr., executive director of the Hogg Foundation, to learn more about the Hogg Foundation’s support of a mental health recovery model that prioritizes the voices of individuals with lived experience.

• Into the Fold, Episode 77: Consumer Voice
• Into the Fold, Episode 162: It’s a Texas Thing: Celebrating Recovery at PeerFest
• 3 Things to Know: Recovery
• Texas Recovery Movement
• A Joyful Noise: Peerfest
• Thrauma: From Surviving to Thriving
• Mental Health Policy Fellows and Policy Academy
• $2 Million Awarded to Train Mental Health Policy Fellows in Texas