Helping Provide Hope to People Struggling with Mental Illness and Addiction

Lakeview Center Behavioral Services : Success Story

Shortly after 6:30 most weekday mornings, Terry O’Connor begins her rounds at the Baptist Hospital Behavioral Medicine Center. On a typical day, she will visit more than 30 patients, introducing herself and asking if it would be all right to ask a few questions.

Terry’s job entails completing a 15-item checklist on each of those patients so their psychiatrists can gauge what is going on with them on that particular day. Very often, however, something else happens during Terry’s visits: “I can see that A-ha! look in their eyes,” she says. “It’s like they’re thinking, ‘Maybe I can get better.’”

Terry is a certified peer specialist. Just a few years ago she had been a patient in the Behavioral Medicine Center. After suffering the chaos of bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, Terry is in recovery. Sharing her history can have a powerful effect on someone else struggling with a mental illness. “It’s peers talking to peers. That’s when the flame of hope gets lit,” she says.

Hope is ingrained in the culture at Lakeview Center, which manages the Behavioral Medicine Center through a contract with Baptist Hospital. As the region’s largest, most comprehensive provider of behavioral health services, Lakeview specializes in helping people with mental illnesses, substance abuse disorders and developmental disabilities overcome their challenges. In the previous year alone, more than 25,000 people received services through Lakeview’s Behavioral Health division.

Terry O’Connor is among those who have been helped by Lakeview Center. By the time she was first hospitalized at the Behavioral Medicine Center, she had lost a good job, the custody of a child and her independence. That was nearly five years ago. Over the course of several hospitalizations, Terry’s doctors were able to find the right balance of medications, stabilizing her condition and enabling her to focus on recovery. She then received outpatient counseling from a Lakeview therapist Terry describes as “amazing.”

At the suggestion of that therapist, Terry got involved with a local support group for people with depression and bipolar disorder. It was there that she first learned of an intensive, 40-hour course to train people with mental illnesses to help their peers. “That course literally changed my life,” she said. “It changed my perspective about myself, my life, my possibilities.”

The course showed Terry how she could help others believe in the possibility of their own recoveries. It taught her how to help them to understand their illnesses, to identify their strengths, to methodically take control of their lives.

Terry returned to college, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in December 2006. The following August she became a volunteer peer specialist at the Behavioral Medicine Center. In January 2008 she was hired part-time. She is now working full-time, making her Florida’s first fulltime certified peer specialist.

“When I was here as a patient, I would imagine coming back and helping people, but I never thought I would actually do it,” Terry said. “It’s a good feeling, a real good feeling, to be helping others going through the same thing I went through.”

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