Welcome From the Director

Friends,

Welcome to the Texas Mental Health Consumers website.

Texas Mental Health Consumers is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to organize, encourage, and educate mental health consumers throughout Texas. Our vision is the integration of individuals diagnosed with mental illness into the community as productive, functional, valued, citizens.

We wish to minimize dependence upon professionally directed services and expand the use of peer support services. We seek to become a unified culture identified not by our diagnoses or disabilities, nor by our past dependence, but by our “humanistic," growth-oriented approach to life. We foresee our consumer culture characterized by extraordinary kindness, humility, honesty, caring, sensitivity, hard work, interdependence and productivity. We see ourselves as cooperative and collaborative as we remove ourselves from internal and external competition. We compete only with our own psyches to become better humans.

In this vein, George Bernard Shaw once wrote:

Being a force of nature instead of feverish, selfish little clods of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making us happy. We are of the opinion that our lives belong to the whole community and as we live, it is our privilege to do for it whatever we can. We want to be thoroughly used up when we die, for the harder we work, the more we love. We rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to us; it is a sort of splendid torch, which we’ve got a hold of for the moment and we want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Our staff exists to serve our membership as well as the mental health community at large, and we look forward to working with you. This website is one way that we accomplish this.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
Mike Halligan
Executive Director