Patrick

VP of Peer Services

Patrick joined firsthand in August 2021, before it was even a company. As VP of Peer Services, he leads firsthand's team of people with lived experience of mental illness and/or substance use disorder,, work that has shaped almost his entire adult life. Patrick lives with bipolar disorder, and his path to where he is now wasn't a straight one. He's been hospitalized many times, experienced a brief period of homelessness, lost a career, and watched relationships fall away in the way that so often happens when someone is living with serious mental illness. For a long time, the message he kept hearing from the system was a quiet kind of hopelessness, that he would always be sick, always need medication, probably never work again.

Then he met someone who changed everything. Someone came to visit a fellow patient on Patrick's hospital ward and shared a different message: that recovery was possible, and that he himself had lived it. A few weeks after his release, depressed and unsure of what came next, Patrick remembered the drop-in center the man had described, found his way there, and there he was, sitting at the desk. That moment, and the friendship that followed, became Patrick's saving grace.

From that point on, Patrick has spent 36 years walking that same road with others. He co-founded the first peer run drop-in center in Florida and helped peers across the state open centers of their own. He worked for the state, monitoring the very hospitals he had once been a patient in, and co-founded a statewide peer network that grew to 3,500 members. He later led projects at Mental Health America in partnership with the American Psychiatric Association, the CDC during the pandemic, and SAMHSA, including a series on engaging people with serious mental illness who hadn't found their footing in traditional care. It was that series that caught the attention of firsthand's founders. Their message to him was simple: that's exactly what we want to do.