An episode of Changing the Conversation podcast
Harvey Rosenthal shares his perspectives about the rights of people in mental health recovery and the power of peer support with host Livia Davis. This episode is part of a series where we share the wisdom amassed by recovery leaders over the past 5 decades and reflect on the journeys that have laid groundwork for today’s recovery movement.
August 25, 2025
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Livia Davis, Host (00:05): Hello, and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Livia Davis, chief learning officer at C4 Innovations. Today’s conversation is part of a podcast series called Learning from Our Recovery Elders to Inform our Work as Recovery Leaders, delving into the profound wisdom amassed by recovery leaders over the past five decades. Through heartfelt conversations and reflections, we hope to explore the journeys of those who have laid the groundwork for today’s recovery movement.
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Our aim is not only to preserve their invaluable insights, but also to inspire future leaders in the ongoing pursuit of recovery. By understanding the history and lessons of our predecessors and current leaders, we hope to inform the path forward for the next 50 years.
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My guest today is Harvey Rosenthal. Harvey is the chief executive officer of The Alliance of Rights and Recovery, a national peer provider agency dedicated to improving the rights, social justice, recovery, and full community inclusion.
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Hello, Harvey. Thanks for joining us today.
Harvey Rosenthal, Guest (01:18): Of course, Livia. Good to be with you.
Livia (01:21): Harvey, you’ve been working in the field of recovery for 50 years now. What would you like the next generation of recovery leaders to know about the history of the rights and recovery and peer support movements? Maybe we can break them down just into three, and you can start by talking about the history of the rights movement.
Harvey (01:41): Well, I think the first thing is I would want to say that the ultimate purpose of our work should be in mental health, not rehabilitation or normalization or community inclusion. Not any one of those, but liberation, getting free. Free of discrimination, free of mental blocks, free of poverty and racism. My job is not to help people get jobs, as important as that is, it’s to help people get free within themselves and in their world. That’s very important to me.
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I really didn’t come to the rights movement to the degree that I am now at first. I started out myself a person in a mental hospital. I eventually came up to Albany, where I am now, to work in a state hospital, where I wanted to help people get free, free of being in the hospital, free of feeling like a patient, feeling like they were hopeless, things like that.
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I then worked in an outpatient clinic and was director of a clubhouse for a while. The clubhouse certainly felt a lot more freeing and liberating, and I’ve always had, I think, a real appreciation and a respect for people. I’m very able to go with wherever people go, no matter how they talk and how they be. I’m down with it.
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But I met Ed Knight when I was working at the club, and Ed Knight was my mentor. He did so much for me, and he was a great leader. He was a guy that actually twice when he was in a psych hospital in Florida was not released because he said upon discharge, he wanted to be a researcher for people with mental illness. They wouldn’t let him go because they thought that was crazy. He said, “I want to be a clerk,” and they discharged him, and he became a psychologist and a researcher for people with mental illness.
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He was my teacher and my hero, and he spread peer support throughout New York State like a Johnny Appleseed. But he introduced me to the rights movement, which I wouldn’t have met otherwise. And so, I met all the leaders at Alternatives, at NARPA (National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy), at different conferences. Judi Chamberlain and Joseph Rogers and George Ebert, all these folks, Gayle Bluebird, Sally Zinman, who became my friends. I’m so happy to say to become friends with your heroes, it’s a pretty amazing thing. But they were really so brave and bold and fearless in that regard, and they had obviously a real… I mean, the first thing you do to acknowledging and being in recovery is to recognize you have to have rights. You stand alone a lot of the time. Really, you need to have the courage to both act from that place and expect people to allow you to do that, or at least to make space for that.
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Rights became really important to me. I’ve always been a non-compliant person. I was raised that way. I grew up that way. I mean, not a happy home life, so I’m always interested in freedom, in individuality, and not allowing untruths to go by. And so those people that I met were very much like that, and they were real rebels and thinking very much outside the system.
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Now remember, I worked in the system. I was working in a club, and that really led me further into human rights. When I became the director of this association, human rights was number one, and it had to do starting with helping people not be told they would never… They had a right to recover. They had a right to get good support. They had a right to be helped out of poverty and discrimination, and most of all, they had the right not to be coerced to take medication or go in the hospital, that it ought to be their choice. That’s always became and has always been the key factor in my work.
Livia (05:43): Right. I mean, that just the rich history of some of the leaders and mentors that inspired you and laying the foundation of rights, what decades are we talking about, Harvey?
Harvey (05:55): Well, I met them I would say in the early ’80s, late ’70s, early ’80s. But what’s important to know is that people sometimes think I’m in the early rights, but I wasn’t because they were. I met them and I was almost as old as they were because I came through it late. I was a step a half behind them, so I would say that in the ’80s.
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I will say, just to add to that, a lot of my friends had been abused, had seen, had been secluded, restrained, shocked, forced medicated. That was not my experience. I was not forcibly hospitalized. Makes prescribed medicine, and I didn’t take it. I went to live my life. Although I felt different, not always bad different.
Livia (06:48): Harvey, you’ve just shared a lot of the foundation of the rights movement, and could you talk next about the recovery movement? How did it grow out of the rights movement, or how did it build on it?
Harvey (07:00): Well, I’m going to take a left turn and say this, that we forget that rights should be at the beginning of everything. Everything we do should go back to rights. But what happened is when you go from the rights to the recovery movement and the recovery to peer support movement, sometimes you lose that focus on rights and recovery becomes more of a process. Peer support, as much as I love it, becomes part of an industry. Peer supporters forget they’re in the tradition of the rights. When they leave that and become business people, that’s a real loss. That’s a real corruption, I think, of what this movement is intended to be about, by good people who wind up in a business and try to manage.
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Recovery, I remember seeing recovery. We had an AA meeting in our clubhouse. We were the first clubhouse in New York that had an AA meeting. And so, I heard the words recovery. I saw that that meant that people could move ahead, and I was probably not alone in being among the first, I mean among many, to start using the word in mental health because we hadn’t used that at the time. I was told when I worked in the hospital not to use the word recovery because it would give people false hope. It was not an easy beginning, but everybody gets to recover. When I started, it was like low functioning and high functioning, and who gets to recover and who’s really a person in recovery and who’s in the movement and not. You’re in the movement, you’re in recovery, if you say you are. It’s really your identification about that. I think the recovery movement began to stretch out. I think Ed had a lot to do with that and really having a framework for that.
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I will say that the difference or maybe the importance of what we did over here is that picking up on where I was before, we weren’t just against psychiatry and against medication. My feeling was, okay, once you’re into recovery or once you decided about medication, what about the rest of your life? What about citizenship? What about housing? What about employment? What about the rest of your life? It’s not just about whether I take medicine or not, which the beginning of the movement was that was it. We didn’t get into the rest of it.
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I’d like to think we were one of the groups that came in talking about social determinants, if you will, we didn’t call it that at the time, and holism and alternatives and things like that, although that was certainly part of the movement. Things like the social determinants allow people to be free and to have rights. If you’re poor, if you’re homeless, if you’re stuck in a cycle of rehospitalization, then you have no recovery. But it’s all those things: it’s peer support, it’s having a wellness plan, it’s having a roof, its having friends, it’s having money, it’s having transportation. We’ve worked out all of that as well.
Livia (10:01): Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the peer support movement helps to make that life in the community that you’re describing as a goal. How did the peer movement come about in your recollection?
Harvey (10:16): My understanding is that Judi Chamberlain was one of the first to open up a drop-in center in the Massachusetts area. I forget the name. Ruby Rogers Center. And then there were little pockets of agencies that were coming up, peer-run agencies that were developing that. Throughout the country in California, East and West Coast in particular, there were lot of peer agencies were beginning and operating in a very different way.
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This wasn’t a service. In fact, the purest people like Sherry Mead, peer support never intended to be a service or a program. In fact, it’s corrupted if it is. We’ve always tried to remember that it transcends being a service, it’s a relationship. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of taking power, having dignity as important as it is a service.
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We over here, our beginning in peer support was we had worked the closed state hospitals here in New York. We took the people themselves and gave them the microphone and got them to go to the capitol every day until they closed five state hospitals. And then the money that was available to reinvest into the community could go to a couple of main purposes. One of them was to reduce the census. One of them was to grow peer support. And frankly, we just combined those two and created a Bridger program to help through their use of peers and the support of peers to leave and stay out of state hospitals. We created the Peer Bridger model throughout the country, and it began with those two things. How do we help people leave hospitals with the help of peer support?
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Peer support is sacred, and it is in my life. For so many people, it equalizes the relationship. It has people listening to you and not telling you, knowing people will be there, a phone call away. It’s very rich, very rich element that’s critical in my recovery.
Livia (12:18): You’ve talked about the history of the rights and recovery and peer support movements. What is your key takeaway to share with the next generation of recovery leaders about those three pillars, the rights, recovery, and peer support movements?
Harvey (12:33): Well, if it isn’t about rights, then it’s not right. It’s not what it’s supposed to be. Anything we do has to circle back to rights. People have a right to recover, and they have a right to get the right services, and they have a right to get certainly access to peer support. That’s critical. Everything is always about freedom, as I said at the beginning, having choice, really defining your life, defining what you want, who you want, what you call yourself, what you’re working on. Recovery then is that pathway you decide what you think you want to work on, what’s needed to make you whole or offer you a place in life. Sometimes it’s a connection to spirituality, which I think is a big part of recovery for so many people like myself.
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I think recovery is a pathway. Rights is where it begins, and we must never forget that. Recovery is a pathway that’s defined by individuals, and it just is what they do to help get whole, to move ahead, to feel comfortable, to be fulfilled. Peer support has become the pathway for that for many is the vehicle, the relationships that make that happen.
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All of those should be remembered as they really are not associated with or essential to the mental health system. The system is something different. These are three separate things that always stand together. You have a right to recover. You get to define what your recovery is, and very often peer support is that first choice, the person that walks beside you throughout the path of recovery and reinforces that your rights are most important.
Livia (14:15): I love that connection between the three of them and how you’re also delineating the differences and how they tie together. I love the emphasis on the relationship that peers provide, so thank you for that.
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Let’s just shift for a moment. As you think about the future of recovery, where do you think the field is going? If you are going to talk about maybe the recovery movement or the field of recovery, where should it go?
Harvey (14:41): I think something that’s, again, always individualized and not dependent on services and supports. We always need to remember that. But again, human rights, people defining their pathway, it doesn’t have to be in a service. It can be in any number of ways. There are many movements that we associate with beyond the recovery movement. There’s the independent living movement, there’s the racial justice movement, social justice movements, criminal justice reformers. All those, I think, are part of recovery and part of the advocacy that’s really critical, and part of bringing the communities together who have that shared experience of oppression, of feeling like the other, of feeling hopeless.
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I don’t know. I think that recovery will deepen as people… In a way, there’s something new and more that can happen. In a way, it should never change. It’s what people define. It’s so personal, and I don’t know that it is always going to be really what people need it to be. There’s no real formula you can put on that.
Livia (15:55): I love the emphasis on that as well, right? It’s self-determined, which is another tenet we’ve heard again and again as a foundation for the recovery movement.
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Harvey, you are the Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance for Rights of Recovery, and that agency has been around for a long time. What are three top lessons learned about starting a peer-led agency that you could share with new leaders in the process of starting a peer-led agency or assuming a role as the chief executive officer of a peer-led agency?
Harvey (16:31): Well, I’ll tell you about our strategic plan: there never has been one. It’s really for me about God. It’s about what spirit puts in front of you and what you’re meant to do and where that takes you and where that takes you. Spirit’s job is to give me the opportunity. My job is to see it and run with it and hopefully use the skills of communication, articulation, planning, negotiation, all of that.
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I never intended to be a businessman and run an agency. The only reason I got another grant from the beginning was to pay for the advocacy because nobody pays for it. And then the advocacy led me to say, “You know what? If we’re going to change the system, then providers need to be trained to support that.” Now we’re a training agency, and if people are going to get supported to be in recovery, then peer support’s important. Okay, Peer Bridger, there’s an important service. Let’s teach that. Let’s learn that, then now we’re a Peer Bridger training and development agency.
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These things all happen, and they’re all interrelated. We have a desire for change; creating services to effectuate that change becomes important. I remember saying in the very beginning this is really holy work, but you have to be a businessperson and a politician too in order to really make it happen. You have to stay away from outrageous statements. This is a movement filled with people just saying all kinds of things and that are not grounded in strategy that’s going to win.
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You have to have outrage and never not be outraged. You have to be disciplined about that outrage and strategic. But if you’re not angry, then you shouldn’t be doing the work because there’s so much injustice and so much of a need to keep pushing and to refuse to give in. That anger really and outrage really helps with that.
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I think you have to look at yourself all the time. Self-reflection is critical, I think, to any leader, any person. I think if you are going to play in the system, you got to be better than good because they don’t expect you to be. And so, you can’t show up with a not ready to play at the table. You got to be the smartest person in the room whenever possible. Do your homework, be the one. I always say to my staff during a meeting, say something smart, and wait for them to say, “Who is that person?” You want to never be quiet in a meeting, and you want to establish that peers or whoever we are, we know what we’re talking about. We bring game and we know how to operate, and we know how to succeed, and we know how to play in the political space.
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I think all those are really fundamental elements of winning, but I just think passion and ideology are by no means enough. There’s all these other elements to win, and I don’t want to just be right. I want to win. I don’t want to just be saying the right thing. I want to stop a bad bill. I want to open up a good sort of operation.
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Again, some of that is discipline. I’m towards the end of my career, I think, and I have carried this responsibility, and sometimes a burden and a promise I made a long time ago. When I move back from this and just, I’m this guy walking a dog down the road out here and maybe aren’t reading the papers every day, what’s going on with forced treatment, there’s a part of me that feels like, have I broken my promise? I made a commitment. It’s in my blood. These are my folks, part of this movement.
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I don’t know if that’ll ever be possible. My wife thinks if I stop working, I’ll fall away. I do feel like this is a responsibility you take. It’s not something really casual. My interest in this began with the Old Testament. I read the Old Testament, as a Jewish guy, and I saw the prophets, and the prophets were so inspiring to me. God sends the prophets out to do the work and make change in the world.
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I wanted that badly, and it never came to me. I was not in the Vietnam War rebel. I was immature and frightened. Civil rights passed me by. It wasn’t until I was in mental hospital that I found my calling and my movement, and that’s the inspiration that’s always really moved me is to… It’s a special kind of calling and it’s very rewarding and it’s very demanding. Maybe if you’re talking to older people like me, maybe that starts to tamp down a little bit. I’m blessed that I have really good team of people who are going to pass this along. It allows me to stand back a little bit, and I’m looking forward to being a little more present, taking more walks, and spending time with my wife and our animals and playing music.
Livia (21:38): Well, thank you, Harvey. I know I have learned a lot from you, and I know that you have been an incredible champion for rights, recovery, and for peer support. I thank you for all you’ve done. I thank you for your friendship and for your advocacy, and I am so happy you came to be part of our podcast today.
Harvey (22:00): Oh, thank you, Liv. It’s always great to be with you. You’re a good friend, and you’ve done a lot for our community.
Livia (22:06): Harvey, thank you. And to our listeners, join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Erika Simon (22:13): Visit C4innovates.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more resources to grow your impact. Thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Erika Simon and Christina Murphy. Our theme song was written and performed by Peter Hanlon. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.