About PRCH
The Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH) is jointly sponsored by the Connecticut Mental Health Center of the Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies of Yale University. We conduct research, training, evaluation, and policy development in the areas of recovery from serious mental illness and substance use, and health disparities.
PRCH was founded in 1999 by a group of experienced and resourceful social scientists, clinical and community-based providers, educators, community organizers, and people in recovery who had grown dissatisfied with the current state of mental health and addiction services, the limitations services placed on individuals’ chances for recovery, and the disparities in care based on ethnicity and culture.
Since its founding, PRCH has made substantive and enduring contributions to the “revolution” currently being called for in behavioral health care—both by the U.S. Government (DHHS, 2005) and by the recovery community in the U.S. and throughout the world. Consistent with the suggestion of John McKnight (1992) that “[r]evolutions begin when people who are defined as problems achieve the power to redefine the problem,” we take the central task of our work to be involving people living with addictions and mental illnesses in redefining their challenges in their own terms. Rather than viewing these individuals as problems to be addressed through the intervention of others, we view people as the experts on the problems and difficulties posed by mental illness and addiction, and, consequently, as the foremost experts on identifying solutions to these same problems.
We sought to create and pursue a vision for a dramatically different future in which the “outdated science, outmoded financing, and unspoken discrimination” that far too often characterizes behavioral health care (DHHS, 2003) is replaced by hope-filled, culturally-responsive, and recovery-oriented services and supports which enable people to reclaim their lives as valuable and contributing citizens of their communities.
PRCH has developed a national and international reputation as a leader in articulating, operationalizing, and implementing culturally-responsive and recovery-oriented care through this approach in researching innovative and effective community and peer-based services and supports, assisting systems of care in becoming more culturally-responsive and recovery-oriented, reducing health care disparities, and improving individual, agency, and system-level outcomes.
