The Mental Health Association of Southwest Florida and Rick Ritchason have joined forces to educate the community on PTSD and his personal experience of survival and recovery:
Rick Ritchason wages a daily battle to find beauty, meaning and hope in his life.  A compassionate man who has dedicated his life to serving others.  Rick fell into a severe depression on two separate occasions, when an airline employee, he was called to respond to two disasters, including September 11, 2001.
Born in 1964, Rick shared his kind-hearted mother with three siblings, and forty-three foster children she raised over twenty-five years in their Chicago, Illinois home.  As a child he was fascinated by air travel and, although it was not a common occupation for men at the time, dreamed of a career as a flight attendant.
 After enlisting in the Air Force and serving five and a half years as a military police officer. Rick enrolled in a travel school and soon thereafter found employment with an airline. In 1988, he realized his dream and was hired as a flight attendant. read more.....

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Jeffrey Ryan has been a powerful force for advocacy in the Florida mental health community for many years.  While finding his way down the confusing path to his own recovery he has helped scores of fellow consumers fight for their dignity and rights.  In 1992 he co-founded the Mindmenders Foundation, the first consumer/survivor organization in Florida to contract with the state to provide peer run services.
My story of illness and history of treatment begins in childhood at a time when mental health services were often harsh and damaging.

At 13, I began to have auditory hallucinations telling me to kill myself. After trying to commit suicide in the early 1960s, I was committed to a State hospital, where I was kept for 9 months in an adult unit with about 40 residents- no children’s unit existed. I was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and put on several different kinds of medication including Thorazine, Stelizine, and Mellarile. In addition, I received electroconvulsive and hydrotherapy. The side effects of those medications and treatments were so horrible that I found the best “alternative” was “self-medicating” by abusing alcohol and drugs, starting at 14. read more...

Angela Fazio, Voted most talented of my high school class, after graduation I pursued a career as a   performer on tour, in summer stock, off-Broadway and in nightclubs. Four years later I entered Hunter University in Manhattan as a candidate for a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in music. Then I transferred to Albright College, in my hometown of Reading, PA, changing my major to pre-med following a futile dream of a medical practice with a young man who was then my fiancé. Neither the dream nor the romance lasted. Read more….