Dr Priscilla Ridgway PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, in the Program for Recovery and Community Health, New Haven, Connecticut. Her more than 30-year career in mental health spans direct practice, consumer advocacy/human rights protection, program design and administration, policy analysis and planning, training, consultation and research. Ridgway was a Branch Director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, and later coordinated a statewide Recovery Paradigm Project in Kansas, from 1999-2004. Her work includes designing and conducting recovery trainings; qualitative research on the processes of hope and recovery; co-authoring Pathways to Recovery: A Strengths Recovery Self-Help Workbook (Ridgway, McDiarmid, Davidson, Bayes, et al. 2002), and designing evaluation procedures for recovery oriented programs and systems, including the Recovery Enhancing Environment Measure (REE) and an national effort (Onken, Dumont, Ridgway, Dornan and Ralph, 2002, 2005) to conduct research on consumer perspectives on what helps and what hinders recovery and create a set of systems-level performance measures--the ROSI (Recovery Oriented Systems Indicators). Ridgway recently worked for Advocates for Human Potential, Inc. as part of a team developing a resource kit on best practices in permanent supportive housing. Ridgway has personal experience of mental health recovery; having experienced brain trauma and post traumatic stress disorder.

Keynote Presentation: Overturning Deadening Myths of Chronicity: Listening for Stories of Resilience

The mental health field is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving from predicting permanent disability for people experiencing prolonged psychiatric disorder to acknowledging and actively supporting the enduring potential for rebound and recovery. A shift in paradigms moves us into a new world, and can reveal aspects of our former worldview that were hidden or unspoken. Under the chronicity paradigm ignorance of recovery led to myths that deadened or actively killed mind, body, and spirit. If we are to leave the old paradigm behind and co-create a new culture, we must listen for the stories of resilience that will enliven us, and the work we do, as people in recovery and as helpers.

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