nothin “We’re In The Hope Business” | New Haven Independent

We’re In The Hope Business”

Forlano, Spruill, Sernyak, and Youins at WNHH.

Serena Spruill will never forget the advice that changed her life — and she is in a position to give the same advice to people who need it.

Spruill got the advice in 1996. She had had a half dozen mental breakdowns. She was in recovery at the Connecticut Mental Health Center.

One day a pyschiatric nurse clinician named Robert Krause, who had read her writings and listened to her struggles, told me I didn’t have to sit around like a blob. I could have a productive life. I didn’t have to sit around being medicated.”

It clicked inside,” Spruill recalled: She could reconnect to community.

Spruill followed the advice. She gradually rebuilt her life: She went back to school to earn a general studies degree. Now she’s completing a nutrition degree. She got a job in the cafeteria at at CMHC, cooking for fellow clients. And she has become a recovery support specialist — meaning she meets with others in recovery at CMHC, telling them her story and guiding them on the path to which Krause pointed her.

That story emerged on an epsidoe of WNHH radio’s Dateline New Haven” program. And it was seconded.

Spruill and two fellow recovery support specialists — Richard Youins and Bob Forlano — joined CMHC’s CEO, Michael Sernyak, on the program. They were marking CMHC’s 50th anniversary, looking back at its roots as a first-wave community mental-health institution growing out of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society” and continuing to evolve today to meet new challenges.

CMHC is unusual in that it’s a joint program of Yale’s psychiatric department and the state government’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. That means it has the state money to help 4,000 patients a year (all on Medicaid or uninsured) at multiple locations, and it conducts research that produces broader mental-health breakthroughs. For instance, the research that discovered the anti-depressant benefits of the club drug drug ketamine occurred at CMHC.

A key part of the CMHC strategy is to bring together people like Spruill, Youins and Forlano with clients who feel hopeless.

There’s no more powerful message than people who have lived the experience comping back,” Sernyak said. We’re in the hope business.”

Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full interview with Serynak, Spruill, Youins and Forlano on Dateline New Haven.”

This episode of Dateline” was made possible in part thanks to support from Yale-New Haven Hospital.

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