I wrote at HealthCentral about a year or so ago about The Positive Psychiatry Movement.

This is my term that I’ve decided to champion: acknowledging the best and brightest professionals in the field. Creating a dialogue with our mental health treatment team. Choosing to work towards the optimal outcome instead of settling for less or settling for subpar treatment. This involves demanding excellence.

I make the case for demanding excellence: in our treatment and in our life.

We have the right and duty to demand excellence from our providers.

I also submit that we should pursue excellence in ourselves. Obtaining perfection isn’t possible; striving for excellence IS possible.

A lot of people simply want to have an ordinary or average life. We each have this choice. Yet having a normal life didn’t ever appeal to me. I wanted to move mountains from an early age.

Today: I’m keen to move the mountains of resistance by others in society and by our providers that don’t think people diagnosed with schizophrenia bipolar or other mental illnesses can recover.

Define recovery in your own terms. Reach for the stars because you can always settle for the moon.

Have an average or ordinary life if you want. Yet I wouldn’t settle for average or ordinary treatment.

I’ll end here with this note:

Set the bar. Set the bar for your treatment team. Set the bar for yourself.

To quote the founder and CEO of SZ magazine:

The point is not to set the bar high. The point is to set it. Period.

For too long the bar has been set in the gutter for what most people–and mental health staff–think individuals living with schizophrenia can do.

I say: let’s give a shout out to the best and brightest professionals that have made the commitment to working with their patients to help us achieve optimal mental health.