How Dina Tyler Inspires Mental Health Reform

Dina Tyler inspires and is making it happen in the system right now. This is what a peer specialist looks like. We are the ones who can make the system transform. We know, better than anyone, how to help one another and, more importantly, how to help ourselves.

Dina Tyler is working in the system. Anyone who thinks change cannot happen from within hasn’t met people like Dina. I’m for change happening wherever the movers and the shakers dare to go. Inside and outside…there are no rules for us! The only rule is to deeply and profoundly become ourselves.

She also makes it clear that in her life that resistance and non-compliance is what allowed for her recovery.

The video is 4 minutes that is very much worth your time.

Dina Tyler accepts Peer Specialist of the Year award from National Council for Behavioral Health at NatCon15 in Orlando, FL

Congratulations to Dina!

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Update 2025: This is Dina’s website dinatyler.com

2025: And this is a post about what she’s up to more recently. She hasn’t stopped being amazing: Dina Tyler (inspires): Psych survivor at Psychiatric Grand Rounds, SF

For more about Dina you can listen to the interview on Madness Radio: Communicating With Psychosis

Below is a list of posts from Beyond Meds that look at the system and how we might change it

• Community Mental Health in Times of Crisis
• State of mental health care
• From Self Care to Collective Caring
• Standard psychiatric care: torture (yes, the United Nations, too, calls forced treatment torture)
• Harms of over-treatment in medical care — this is true throughout all of medicine but especially true in psychiatry
• Where Do Messages of Hopelessness in Mental Health Care Come From?
• Health care is a human right
• Exposing the Mental Health system – Only Smarties exhibition
• Mental health professionals along with police, teachers and the corporate press are the guards of the system
• Coming Off Psych Drugs: A Meeting of the Minds — new documentary and info
• Can Our Medical Model of Care Be Remade? — By Robert Whitaker
• Why I’m pro-information and pro-choice when it comes to drugs and medications in mental health care
• Shrinks get patients hooked on drugs and then cut the cord
• Open Dialogue: Alternative Care for Psychosis
• Coercion, subtle or otherwise, is the rule in psychiatric care…
• Medically induced illness: iatrogenic injury

The below are pieces written specifically about the divide between the professionals in the system and those who are subject to their care and/or abuse.

• Bridging Patient-Professional Divide
• Mental health-related stigma in health care and mental health-care settings: response to journal article
• Professional denial is a form of retraumatization (new)
• Being the empowered patient
• The divide between client/patient/consumer and professionals (with list of links)
• healing journey — part 1 and 2 (brief thoughts from this morning to a friend)
• A doctor who talks sense about the all too frequent use of coercion in medicine
• Informed Choice: Pro-information and pro-choice when it comes to drugs and medications
• Words for all in the “helping” professions (and for any human who wants to benefit others)
• Medical compliance? Adherence? No. My MDs are my PARTNERS
• Letters to my shrink

Other significant pieces:

• Mad Rad Crisis Intervention Team Training: psych survivors train sheriff deputies
• Providing sanctuary (alternative to hospitalization in community)

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