Jonathan Delman is a psychiatric survivor and a $125,000 winner of the Robert Wood Johnson leadership prize for his community health work in mental health.

Delman founded and leads an organization called Consumer Quality Initiatives. This is an agency that surveys people who receive mental health services from Massachusetts. They then analyze the data for ways to make improvements. The agency is staffed mainly by people with mental illness.

Delman himself is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and still takes six medications a day to help treat it (three of which, the article notes, are to help him sleep).

Being a patient of the mental health system (and making a dramatic “escape” from McLean Hospital here a decade ago), he’s had a tough, uphill battle to gain legitimacy for his organization. No more.

What kinds of things does his organization survey?

For example, he said, he experienced first-hand how arbitrary rules or petty cruelties by hospital staff can demoralize and alienate patients. Patients can feel that if they complain, they risk retribution, and nothing will change anyway.

So when his agency began to survey psychiatric patients in hospitals, it asked about staff-and-patient interactions. It also asked about other issues that can deeply affect patients: Were they treated with respect and dignity? Did they have needed privacy? Did they have access to a telephone?

Basic human and civil rights you’d think the state itself would be concerned about protecting. Apparently not. Thank goodness for kind-hearted souls like Delman and kudos to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its recognition of Delman’s important, ground-breaking work in Massachusetts.

Another example of a truly empowered e-patient who is leading significant change for others.

Read the full article: Psychiatric patient’s flight from facility leads to a new life

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 2 Nov 2008
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.