Sure, she graduated with honors from Duke University and Harvard’s Kennedy School. She’s an athlete — her first triathlon victory was at age 10 — who is clearly smart, articulate and driven. (Telegenic too — in high school, she appeared as an extra in Beverly Hills, 90210.) But it wasn’t Lisa’s academic pedigree or winning personality that won her a top post as Director of Recovery Services at Vinfen, a Cambridge, Mass. nonprofit that offers psychiatric and other support services to about 7,000 adults and children.

What makes Lisa uniquely qualified to help others deal with the ravages of mental illness is this: Her deep shame, at age 26, over forgetting how to work a coin-operated washing machine; her paranoid self-exile in a dark basement apartment three blocks from Harvard; her sudden thoughts of suicide at life’s little annoyances, from a flat tire to a mediocre test score; her descent into an isolated, pre-literate cocoon, where she was forced to begin again as a child, with “Babar” read aloud by her mother.

That was years ago, after two hospitalizations, medications that made her drool and gain weight, and voices telling her to cross the highway median while driving. These days, Lisa’s on the national lecture and teaching circuit. She speaks at film festivals, major medical conferences and has led Grand Rounds at the hospital where she was once a patient on the psych ward.

Tell Your Story

Lisa’s job at Vinfen requires her to continually exploit much of her past experience to mentor, train and oversee a statewide network of 20 “peer specialists” who care for hundreds of clients. These specialists offer counseling, referrals, medicine and deep listening to those suffering from a range of mental and social problems. There are people with named disorders — schizophrenia, depression, bi-polar, addiction — as well as those whose lives have been shattered through homelessness, lost family connections and other childhood traumas.

The program sounds good on paper, but what gives it power and “street cred” is that all of the peer specialists have “been there” — the “there” being humbled by debilitating mental illness. “You teach from your recovery story,” says Lisa, 38, who believes that the schizophrenic brain can be rehabilitated just like a badly injured body. “It’s about empathy, and showing, not telling. Knowing the experience first-hand, you can provide guidance from your own lived experience.”

The growth of a professional class of peer specialists comes against the backdrop of an evolving national mindset: a greater acceptance that even those who have faced the darkest forms of mental illness can improve or recover. And, the thinking goes, it is precisely that recovery — halting, painful and slow as it may be — that makes those who have lived through it the best positioned to help others like them.

A new study by Yale researchers published in May, for instance, found that patients with support from peer mentors were significantly less likely to be readmitted to a psychiatric hospital. And studies that ask patients, ‘What helped you most in coping with mental illness,’ often get this response: “Having someone believe in me.” The current cadre of peer counselors offer living proof it can be done: they’re like 12-step program sponsors but with more formal training, a salary and instead of seeking to remain anonymous, they are encouraged to go public with their stories.

Peer Specialists Rising — But How High Can They Go?

Dr. Daniel Fisher, a psychiatrist and leader in the national “recovery movement” says peer specialists have become standard in some realms. For example, the Veterans Affairs system hires many such counselors, and the agency requires “lived experience” as a condition of employment. In more than 20 states, Medicaid reimburses for “peer-delivered” services. And there’s been official acceptance at the national level: in 2003, a landmark commission on mental health, appointed by President George W. Bush, envisioned recovery — in some form — as possible for everyone.

Dr. Fisher served on the commission and now advises the Obama administration and directs a leading advocacy group, the National Empowerment Center in Lawrence. Still, he says, discrimination remains pervasive, and he worries that “peer” designated jobs may lead to a “siloed set of positions” that ultimately prevents a class of people from full integration into society.

“I’m glad that people are getting jobs — I advocate for people with lived experience to get those jobs. But there’s a glass ceiling,” he says. “The system doesn’t treat people with dignity and respect when they are labeled with a mental illness. On some level, there’s still a deeply held belief that people don’t recover.” Indeed, for years, Fisher didn’t disclose his own schizophrenia and multiple hospitalizations for fear it would hold him back.

But Lisa says “peers” are starting to make inroads. She says she’s part of a “sea change” in the landscape of mental health where a small but growing group of high-level managers and policy makers are “out” about living with mental illness.

Of course bias still exists, says Elaine Reilly, a peer specialist for Vinfen in Hyannis, Mass. who endured a mental disorder and food addiction that drove her weight up to 300 pounds. Still, she says, she’s seen how the power of peer support can help people who were once completely hopeless begin to thrive again and re-build relationships that seemed long gone. “It’s remarkable what happens when you connect with someone on that level,” she says. “When they know that you know, everything changes, it all melts away, the fear, everything.”

First Signs Of Trouble

Lisa never uses the word “cured.” She remains on medication, and sometimes still has symptoms, like paranoia, when she’s stressed or sleep-deprived. But if you doubt she’s recovered, consider her story:

Born on Mercer Island, off Seattle, the daughter of an oceanographer and a stay-at-home-mom, Lisa dates her first troubling symptoms to pre-school, though she didn’t figure it out until years later. Her parents sent her to “Safety Town,” a summer program where adults simulated “dangerous” events — like a strange man driving up in a car offering candy — and taught the kids to stay away. Lisa was terrified. Safety Town, it seems, marked the start of a pattern: Lisa ran home from school every day afraid she’d be captured en route. She never told her parents.

A few years later, the family moved to a small community near Pasadena. In 1991 she began college at Duke, in North Carolina. That’s when her symptoms became more noticeable. She put black construction paper over the peephole on her door and began to withdraw. She quit her sorority and dropped off the soccer team. “I became very scared of people,” she said. “If anything bad happened, my default was thinking about suicide. ”

Even when a school counselor noted her depression, Lisa didn’t mention it to family or friends. Academically and cognitively, she said, she was able to hold things together. “I was so in denial.”

After college, Lisa worked for Jim Lehrer on the PBS NewsHour booking author interviews, and as a researcher for David Gergen. Then, in the fall of 1998, after moving to Boston to attend the Kennedy School, things got worse.

She was 26, and living in Harvard Square, but Lisa began getting lost on the three-block walk to school. She’d get disoriented on the “T,” get out at the wrong exit and start to cry. To compensate, Lisa stopped taking public transportation. Coins in her hands suddenly looked exactly the same, so she was unable to work the machines at the neighborhood laundromat. “I thought, ‘I’m a student at Harvard, how can I ask someone for help?’”

The troubling thoughts and behavior intensified: “Since I couldn’t wash clothes, I stayed in my basement apartment. I hung around for days and just ran out to get food and come right back. I thought the landlord wanted me dead.” A grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Lisa thought people were out to get her because she was Jewish; once, on the subway, she was convinced all the trains were going to Auschwitz.

To The Depths And Back

Finally, when Lisa told her mother she couldn’t understand her words during a telephone conversation, her mom went online and gave Lisa the number of a doctor at McLean Hospital. That doctor referred Lisa to a psychiatrist whom she still sees, nearly 13 years later.

During that first visit, Lisa couldn’t remember her birthday or social security number, and she could no longer read. She scored 70 on an IQ test, a sign of borderline mental retardation. Diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression, she was hospitalized at McLean’s psychotic inpatient unit in March 1999. Doctors experimented with different kinds of medications, some with terrible side effects like the feeling of ants crawling under her skin. Her mother shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and Boston for many months, and embarked on a systematic plan to rebuild her daughter’s life. She read Lisa children’s books and did word puzzles, they used Play-Doh and coloring books with geometric patterns.

Once Lisa could read on her own again, she began exercising her brain, memorizing passages of Shakespeare and basketball team rankings from the newspaper. Throughout it all her doctor was adamant that she would eventually be able to return to her graduate studies. “”Even though I couldn’t read or write, he was definitive that I would go back to school,” she said. “He held the hope even when I couldn’t.”

A second hospitalization, in June, was meant to get Lisa on the drug Clozaril, which eased her symptoms and indeed, helped her get back to Harvard. But the side effects were tough: drooling, weight gain, sedation, blood draws. She stayed on Clozaril for 10 years, during which time she also took 10 other medications just to deal with the side effects. (Now, she’s on a different drug with far fewer side effects.)

In June 2001 Lisa graduated from Harvard Kennedy School with a master’s degree in public policy, having switched her focus from economics to mental health. She’s been working in the field of recovery ever since: at Vinfen, at the National Alliance on Mental Illness and at the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, among others. She tries to make herself available to peers, non-peers and those not yet “out” about their mental illness, holding monthly meetings and regular lunches open to anyone at Vinfen.

Mario Durand, a former peer specialist and now program director of Aberdeen House, a residential home in Cambridge for eight men and women living with mental illness, says Lisa’s monthly professional peer meetings — he calls them group therapy — are critical. Recently, he said, he had a client discuss a particular trauma, which triggered Mario’s own anxiety and depression. “I know I can go to Lisa to help me,” Mario said. “She’s very approachable. And she provides experience, sympathy and tenderness — that’s a good word for her.”