Michael Rowe, PhD

Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry

Biography

I am an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, a medical sociologist, and former Co-Director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH); Director of PRCH’s Citizens Community Collaborative; Chair of the International Recovery and Citizenship Collective; and Editor of The Perch, a Yale literary and arts journal with a focus on the lived experience of people with mental health challenges. My research in psychiatry began in 1994 when I was hired to develop, with others, and lead a mental health outreach team at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. The CMHC team, with community agency participation, was one of 18 sites nationally of a federal SAMHSA initiative aimed at ending homelessness among people with mental illnesses and providing comprehensive care and supports for them within integrated services systems. My ethnographic study of mental health outreach work led me to development of a model of outreach based on the argument that it must, fundamentally, be aimed not only at providing mental health care, housing, and social services, but at offering access to full and valued membership in society for marginalized persons. I wrote of the results of this study in Crossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach Workers (University of California Press, 1999) and many peer-reviewed articles.

The limitations of outreach work and mental health systems of care led me to develop a theory of social inclusion called 5 Rs Citizenship, with citizenship defined as people’s access to the rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships required for full membership in society. Access to the 5 Rs supports one’s sense of belonging in society that is validated by others, and a sense of belonging supports one’s preservation of the 5 Rs. Achievement of this goal, I contend, would fulfill the promise of ‘a life in the community’ and society envisioned in the report of the Eisenhower Commission on Mental Health in the 1950s and the Community Mental Health Movement starting in the 1960s.

With funding from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health Services (DMHAS), the National Institute for Mental Health, and other sources, my applied research on the citizenship framework with colleagues has included development and validation of an individual measure of citizenship for people with mental illnesses; a community-based citizenship group intervention—The Citizens Project—with positive findings from a randomized trial; the concept of ‘recovering citizenship’ in which one’s recovery is achieved in the context of one’s achievement of full citizenship; training for clinicians in employing the citizenship model in clinical work; development of the concept of collective citizenship involving group support and advocacy of persons with mental health challenges; implementation of the Recovering Citizenship Learning Collaborative in collaboration with DMHAS, which provides ongoing statewide training on citizenship-based care and supports for DMHAS-funded mental health centers and clinics; and citizenship training, measurement, and implementation of citizens projects in Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong/China, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland/United Kingdom, and Catalonia/Spain. My scholarship on 5 Rs Citizenship has included a book—Citizenship and Mental Health (Oxford University Press, 2015)—and many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. The first edited volume on citizenship in mental health care, The Routledge International Handbook of Citizenship and Mental Health, edited by Dr. Francisco José Eiroa-Orosa and me, will be published in 2028.

Related to my homelessness and citizenship studies, I have conducted pioneering research on peers as mental health workers, with findings from a randomized trial which demonstrated peer staff’s special ability to engage into treatment persons with mental illnesses who are refusing treatment. I also write and have conducted research in the areas of narrative medicine, patient–doctor relationships, long-term illness, and the promise and risks of high-technology medicine, including peer-reviewed articles, an edited volume on medical errors in oncology, and a narrative nonfiction account of organ transplantation and grief and bereavement. I am the author or editor of six books and 250+ peer-reviewed articles and other publications, and I continue to work with colleagues on citizenship research and writing. I am also a published poet and a published and produced playwright.