What is Peer Respite and why don't we have more of these crisis beds available? A conversation with Guyton Colantuono of Project Return Peer Support Network
04/06/22 • 65 min
Guyton Colantuono is the executive director of Project Return Peer Support Network, a position he has held since 2014. He has spent more than 25 years working in the field of mental health and has led a multitude of programs including those addressing homeless outreach and shelter, transition-aged youth and employment development.
He has an unwavering belief that “people are people first” and a label is not a destiny. His lived experience as a survivor of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness has fueled his passion for a whole-person approach throughout his career.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the unique offerings of a Peer Respite Home, to which he applies the metaphor of a “bed and breakfast for someone experiencing a mental health crisis.” He and his team of peers oversee Hacienda of Hope in Long Beach, one of two peer respites in all of Los Angeles County, and one of five in the state of California.
We’ll talk about how peer respites naturally adopt a posture of radical hospitality in welcoming guests, and how this is a stunningly less expensive bed to provide than those associated with psychiatric hospitalization or the county jail. Peer respite is the ultimate in trauma-informed care, and we’ll make a case for increasing the availability of these beds as a resource for providing care for people living with a mental illness not only in Los Angeles County, but throughout the state.
Resources
'Peer respite' homes aim to be alternative to psychiatric wards - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Guyton Colantuono is the executive director of Project Return Peer Support Network, a position he has held since 2014. He has spent more than 25 years working in the field of mental health and has led a multitude of programs including those addressing homeless outreach and shelter, transition-aged youth and employment development.
He has an unwavering belief that “people are people first” and a label is not a destiny. His lived experience as a survivor of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness has fueled his passion for a whole-person approach throughout his career.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the unique offerings of a Peer Respite Home, to which he applies the metaphor of a “bed and breakfast for someone experiencing a mental health crisis.” He and his team of peers oversee Hacienda of Hope in Long Beach, one of two peer respites in all of Los Angeles County, and one of five in the state of California.
We’ll talk about how peer respites naturally adopt a posture of radical hospitality in welcoming guests, and how this is a stunningly less expensive bed to provide than those associated with psychiatric hospitalization or the county jail. Peer respite is the ultimate in trauma-informed care, and we’ll make a case for increasing the availability of these beds as a resource for providing care for people living with a mental illness not only in Los Angeles County, but throughout the state.
Resources
'Peer respite' homes aim to be alternative to psychiatric wards - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Previous Episode
Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. A conversation with the author, Dr. Tom Insel
Dr. Tom Insel is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and an influential voice in the national conversation that is gaining momentum around the failures of the American mental health system and the need to do better for the humans that are suffering as a result. His new book, released in February 2022, is a worthy read, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health.
In this episode we talk about how his life journey informs his current work and advocacy as he enters this chapter in his life. He speaks with a certain humility about how assumptions he made early in his career, or even while head of the National Institute for Mental Health, have changed as he has spent time with families and people with lived experience. His eyes were further opened to the challenges in our communities as he toured the state on a listening tour in behalf of California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom.
He speaks with eloquence about the profoundly simple idea (yet hard to implement or fund in our current system) to focus on People, Place and Purpose to support an individual’s recovery from their mental illness.
Dr. Insel joined our delegation in September 2019 when we attended the international mental health conference in Trieste Italy and he shares some memories from that experience.
Additional links and resources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/american-mental-health-crisis-healing/622052/
Additional articles from his website:
Press — Thomas Insel, MD (thomasinselmd.com)
Finally, Dr. Insel is part of a team that has created a new information source MindSite News.
From their Mission Statement:
MindSite News is a new nonprofit, nonpartisan digital journalism organization dedicated to reporting on mental health in America, exposing rampant policy failures and spotlighting efforts to solve them. We seek to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the workings and failings of the U.S. mental health system and to impact that system through our reporting, making it more equitable, effective, transparent and humane in its care for individuals and families struggling with mental illness.
Next Episode
Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia: his life, his impact, his legacy. A conversation with Professor John Foot.
John Foot is a professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol in the U.K. He is an expert on the life of Dr. Franco Basaglia, the visionary psychiatrist whose lasting impact on the Italian mental health system continues to inspire the world.
We will explore Professor Foot’s journey into this avocation, which was sparked by the chance viewing the film San Clemente (1982) while on a trip to Trieste.
Professor Foot is author of Franco Basaglia: the Man who Closed the Asylums. He is a co-editor of compendium of essays about the impact of Trieste in other counties that emanated from a symposium held in Oxford in 2018. It is titled Basaglia’s International Legacy: From Asylum to Community.
We also explore in this interview the plan to translate into English a book that was originally published in 1968, L’istituzione negata (The Negated Institution), which had seminal impact on advancing the Basaglian revolutionary school of thought in Europe and South America.
That one man could have such profound impact on advancing a human-centered, community-based system of care for people living with mental illness is astounding. This interview will provide some insights into Basaglia, who is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world.
Other resources associated with the interview:
Documentary (1968) I giardini di Abele
Book (1969) Morire di classe
Documentary (2013) Dentro le proprie mura
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