Become An M-POWER Friend

Thomas Gagnon Interviews Martin Koehler 

Editor's Note: In this Interview journalist Tom Gagnon asks Martin about his life and work, past and present. 

I met with Martin Koehler in his creatively self-expressive apartment near Inman Square in Cambridge, MA. Martin Koehler has worked in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation since the late ‘80s.

Thomas Gagnon: The first thing I want to know about is your background: family, occupation, interests, that kind of thing.

Martin Koehler :Well,  I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, which is a very famous town, famous for its thinkers and for its Nature, and I got into both as a kid, and then I got into marijuana and the hippie scene and music, as a teenager. And then I went to Harvard and became “mentally ill” in the middle of my career there, took some time out, but was able to finish, get the baccalaureate in 1977. But I really had no purpose or direction i life at that time, so I just kind of hung around, smoking with my friends and doing a lot of deep study in such esoteric subjects as The Kalevala from Finland or in Walt Whitman or in Wallace Stevens—American poets. Slowly I began to declare myself as a mental patient—I prefer the term c/s/x, which stands for consumer/survivor/ex-patient—and to work with M-POWER and with the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, where I co-authored a book with Leroy Spaniol, who’s a professor there, and with Dori Hutchinson, entitled The Recovery Workbook. We also have a companion volume called The Experience of Recovery, which is an anthology of c/s/x own first-person accounts of how they were getting through their illness and their recovery. I’ve had many girlfriends over the years, and I have found them all to be helpful. It really eases the pain, to have a girlfriend beside you, even if it’s not always the same one. I’ve been working with IN A Nutshell. In A Nutshell is the newsletter of M-POWER, and I’m also working with expanding into my own recovery workshops, teaching them off-campus now, off the BU campus, a lot of them with Vinfen Corporation and all of them with PEP (Peer Educator’s Project), which is headed by Moe Armstrong and Naomi Pinson. I continue to play the guitar. I learned many folk songs from my father when I was a teenager, and I’ve maintained them to this day. I occasionally get gigs and also have a couple of recording offers, which I am preparing for. I’ve done some theatre in my life, some in high school and some in a halfway house that I lived in, in the middle ‘80s, in Brighton called EIKOS, which means home in Greek. And trying to urge the social club I go to, the Cambridge/Somerville Social Club, to do more theatre work, but as yet we haven’t been able to arrange a time that we all could meet. I still hav done some writing, both prose and poetry, and publishing with The Awakenings Review, with The University of Chicago.

Thomas Gagnon: What is psychiatric rehabilitation?

Martin Koehler: Psychiatric rehabilitation makes some very basic assumptions. We are not really sick, we are disable, because we are unable to function in society, because we lack the skills and supports necessary for anyone to function at any level in any environment. And yet when we choose an environment that we’d like to work in, or learn in, or live in, we’re able to learn the skills and put in place the supports that enable us to continue to function in those places.

Thomas Gagnon: What did you do at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation?

Martin Koehler : Well, in the ‘80s, I was a student there in the Continuing Education Program, and I learned the basics of rehabilitation that I’ve just denoted, plus I got the supports and learned some of the skills that enabled me to branch out beyond what I was able to do before that. I was hired on as a payroll employee in ‘89, and I was then a research assistant with Dr. Spaniol working with him on preparing the text of the Recovery Workbook. In ‘94 that grant ran out, and we got another one, which was to do a kind of survey, a research survey, of people who were in recovery, following them through four years of their lives with periodic interviews and collecting data from them in that way. And finally we were able to put together a report on the research we’d done and also in addition to that I was able to start to do a lot of teaching of The Recovery Workbook, and of also some regular matriculated Boston University students at the Sargent College of Allied Health Professions, as it was known then, teaching with Leroy Monday evening classes, which goes on to this day. He’s asked me to return for a guest appearance in September.

T. G.: The rest of these questions are about the Peer Educator's Project. Who started the Peer Education Project and when?

M.K.: Well I’m not sure if it was Moe or it was Naomi or both at once that were stricken by the thought. I don’t quite know how it began, but what Moe did was to take The Recovery Workbook, and the recovery workshops that he had been teaching and using, and made it into a program so that we could be funded by the administration. In fact, he worked out a contract with the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Partnership, which is a big institution, and they get funding themselves from the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Naomi does a project called Double Trouble in Recovery meetings (DTR). They are 12 step meetings designed for people who are dually diagnosed, people who have both mental illness and also a substance abuse problem. I think they’re finishing their second year. No, I know when it started January of 1999.

T. G.:  What is the purpose of the Peer Education Project?

M.K. : Well it’s to help people with recovery, both through classroom, textbook teacher-student type of context or mode or else through the 12 step style or model of helping people reach recovery.

T.G.:   Describe a day in the life of the Peer Education Project.

M.K.: Well, there are meetings and there are classes going on around the state all the time. Probably you can find one on any day in any city, but I don’t know specifically where or when. I myself am teaching, let’s see, it goes: Monday evening, Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, Thursday morning, Friday afternoon and starting one up on the weekend at the social club that I go to. So it keeps me busy, but it’s not as pressured and as stressful as other so-called full-time jobs might be. I have one more thing to add we’ve started to use team teaching, or co-teaching in the recovery workshop/ For instance, I’m doing some co-teaching with Katherine Mazlish and also some co-teaching with Ken Krivit out at Westborough State Hospital on Thursday mornings and teaching with John Depaulo on Tuesday afternoons at the Market St. Address. A lot of this happens with Vinfen. Vinfen has been really helpful to the Peer Education Project, to let us use their resources, tap into their resources of people and architecture, so that we can actually have good classroom scenes. All through this I’m recovering. My recovery is intertwined with other people’s with whom I’ve worked, for instance, in helping Leroy to write that textbook, that was me in recovery, recovering further because of the work, and helping others’ recovery further through the work.