PATRICIA E. DEEGAN, Ph.D. Senior Program Associate Patricia Deegan is a well-known consumer advocate and recovery expert. For theNew Freedom Initiative: State Coalitions to Promote Community-Based Care (NFI) project at AHP, Dr. Deegan produced a documentary about the lives of long-term psychiatric hospital inpatients who made a successful return to the community. She also is the creator of an innovative resource and training program for service providers called Common Ground: Recovery Oriented Practice. She was a co-founder of the National Empowerment Center, Inc., a consumer-run national technical assistance program funded by the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS). Dr. Deegan is an expert in the areas of recovery and empowerment and is an activist in the consumer/survivor movement. She is widely published and has given keynote addresses and lectures to professional organizations around the world. Since 1997, Dr. Deegan has been involved in documenting ex-patient perspectives on the history of mental health services and has explored modern issues of racial disparity in healthcare through the exploration of historically segregated asylums in America. She has helped to collect the oral history of survivors of mental institutions and has advocated for the inclusion of these voices in historical accounts of mental health care. Dr. Deegan’s current projects include researching a recovery-based approach to using psychiatric medications at the University of Kansas, developing recovery-based competences for mental health practitioners, helping to restore forgotten cemeteries at state hospitals, and helping consumers win money for new housing through the sale of state hospitals.
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