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Patricia E. Deegan PhD has conducted trainings focused on recovery and empowerment since 1987. Her audiences have included people with psychiatric disabilities, peer specialists, medical students, graduate students, academics, policy makers, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, hospital staff, ACT teams, residential workers, case managers, police officers, pastoral counselors, and vocational/rehabilitation counselors. Some of Pat’s trainings are described below.

Pat offers both didactic and experiential trainings and workshops. Her workshops often include multimedia presentations with time for questions and discussions. Pat will tailor the content and format of trainings to fit your learning objectives and time preferences. Half-day, full-day and multiple day trainings and institutes are available.

The demand for Pat's training often exceeds her availabilty.  She has personally trained other outstanding trainers to present her materials.  All trainers with Pat Deegan & Associates are people who have lived their own journey of recovery and have worked in the field of mental health. Contact us to learn about availability of trainers.

Additinally, Pat is available for live telebroadcast training with downlinks to remote sites. This method of training works well for rural and frontier states, as well as for large organizations with multiple sites.

Pat also is available for web-based training in the form of interactive web-conferencing or streaming webcast. Web-based training is less expensive than telebroadcasting and it can be interactive. This type of training is ideal for busy organizations with 24-hour staffing patterns. Webcasts and conferences can be stored on your server so that staff can log-on and attend the training when time permits.

Please contact us to discuss your training needs.

Sample of Trainings

• CommonGround: Recovery Oriented Practice
• From Compliance to Alliance: Supporting clients' use of medication in the recovery process
• Recovery: the experience, the evidence and the practice
• A 300-Year History of Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Advocacy
• Hearing Voices: A simulation to increase empathy and understanding
• Principles and Themes of the Recovery Process
• Empowerment and Collective Recovery: The story of how a group of ex-patients restored a forgotten state hospital cemetery and secured $4.26- million dollars for new housing through the sale of a state hospital

Recovery: the experience, the evidence and the practice

In this training Patricia E. Deegan PhD will talk about her own experience of recovery from schizophrenia. She will make the point that recovery is not the privilege of a few exceptional people and will review worldwide empirical research on recovery showing that a majority of those diagnosed with major mental disorders recover. Dr. Deegan will then outline some recovery-based competences that mental health practitioners must master in order to support clients in their recovery.

A 300 Year History of Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Advocacy

In this multimedia presentation Pat Deegan will review the efforts of people diagnosed with mental illness to speak in their own voice and advocate on their own behalf. From individual etchings, drawings, self-published books, and organized groups such as the Alleged Lunatics Friends Society (1834), to the modern day cross-disability movement, people with psychiatric disabilities have a long history of self-advocacy. There will be time to explore linkages between historical issues and advocacy issues of today.

Hearing Voices: A Simulation to Increase Empathy and Understanding

Drawing on her personal experience as well as a review of the literature, Dr. Deegan will open this workshop with a lecture about the voice hearing experience. Then workshop participants will have an opportunity to use headphones to experience what distressing voices are like. While undergoing the simulation, participants will have to perform various tasks, not unlike the kind that clients in programs are asked to perform. A discussion period follows and participants are encouraged to explore how they will change their work with clients based on their newfound insights. An afternoon session on strategies for coping with voices is optional.

Principles and Themes of the Recovery Process

In this workshop Dr. Deegan will discuss some of the common themes and principles of the recovery process. Drawing on her personal experience of recovery from schizophrenia, as well as on her research about how people recover, Pat will describe some of the key turning points in that process as well as implications for service providers/systems. Audiotapes of research participants describing themes of their recovery are used to amplify the lecture material. There will be time for questions and discussion.

Empowerment and Collective Recovery: The story of how a group of ex-patients restored a forgotten state hospital cemetery and secured $4.26- million dollars for new housing through the sale of a state hospital

In 1997, Pat Deegan helped form the Danvers State Memorial Committee comprised of a group of former patients from Danvers State Hospital. The group set out to restore a forgotten and neglected state hospital cemetery. In so doing, they overcame stereotypes and took their place as civic leaders in the community, reached their goal of restoring the cemeteries, and successfully advocated for 4.26 million dollars for new housing through the sale of the hospital. In this multimedia presentation, Pat will tell this story and offer suggestions about how local mental health clients can organize to achieve collective recovery and empowerment.