The Psychosis Care and Connection Retreat was hosted by Ellenhorn, Gould Farm, and Austen Riggs Center. Help in the Home was proud to sponsor the retreat alongside a group of organizations doing meaningful work with individuals who have complex mental health needs, including McLean Hospital, Windhorse Integrative Mental Health, Bridge House, Lakewood Center, Silver Hill Hospital, Skyland Trail, and Spring Lake Ranch. Rayetta and Stacy were also able to extend their stay to include a day at Gould Farm with their executive director, Lisanne Finston. Being in business now for nearly 20 years, we realize how important it is to collaborate and learn from like minded organizations to provide the best care possible for our clients and families. Here are Rayetta and Stacy’s takeways from their trip.
Lessons from the Road
We attended the retreat because we knew there would be value in a roundtable discussion built around the goal of reimaging how we understand and support people experiencing psychosis. This year’s retreat brought together clinicians, researchers, advocates, program leaders, and people with lived experience for several days of dialogue, storytelling, and collaborative inquiry, all aimed at moving care beyond fragmented systems and toward something that restores purpose, identity, dignity, and belonging.
Gould Farm hosted the retreat on its 700-acre campus in Monterey, Massachusetts. Founded in 1913, Gould Farm is the first residential therapeutic community in the country, a place where adults with mental health and related challenges rebuild their lives through community living, meaningful work, and clinical care. The people who live there are called “guests,” not patients or clients, and that one word choice tells you a lot about the culture of the place before you ever set foot on it.
We were invited as sponsors because the work Help in the Home does every day, coordinating community-based care for people with complex needs, sits squarely inside the same mission this retreat was built around. It didn’t feel like showing up to support someone else’s cause. It felt like being welcomed into a room full of people already doing the work we care about.
The sessions covered a lot of ground: family support, the role of spirituality and the arts in recovery, and what it really means to listen to someone in the middle of a psychotic episode instead of just managing them. But the through-line of the whole weekend was connection. Not treatment plans, not diagnoses, connection. We expected good sessions and useful conversation with peers in the field. What we didn’t expect was how much the retreat would feel less like a professional event and more like a personal one, and that gap between expectation and outcome turned out to be the best part of the weekend.
We also didn’t expect a black bear. One evening, after dinner, we were relaxing in Stockbridge when a black bear loped right down the sidewalk in front of us. It was startling and, in hindsight, kind of perfect. Across a lot of cultures, encountering a bear is seen as a message to trust your instincts, hold your ground, and make time for retreat and healing.
That landed differently for us than it might for most people, because it names something true about the work we do every day. There is no clean, laminated map for this field. We have to trust our instincts while staying grounded in compassion, and that requires real personal introspection, healing, and self-care. It’s part of why we’ve built time for that directly into how our teams operate at Help in the Home. It isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the thing that lets us keep doing this work well and doing it for the long haul.
One of the most powerful parts of the weekend was a panel featuring Bob, who lives with schizophrenia. Bob talked about what it meant to work side by side with staff at Gould Farm with no label separating them. That structure took the stigma out of the equation and gave him something to build toward. He was visibly proud describing a fence he built on the property, and how that project gave him the motivation to eventually find work and move into his own apartment. He was just as honest about the harder parts. He talked about a relapse tied to using marijuana and stopping his medication, and about the humility it took to walk back into the same program, face how his choices had affected the people who love him, follow his team’s guidance, and work back through the step-down community program. Today, Bob works as a peer specialist. He’s been stable for seven years. His story is exactly why we care so much about peer connection. Sometimes the most credible person in the room isn’t the clinician. It’s the person who has actually lived it and come out the other side.
Gould Farm’s whole design backed up the whole spirit of the retreat. When you remove the invisible wall between “the people who help” and “the people being helped,” something shifts. People find purpose. They find dignity. They find their way back into a life. We saw it play out in something as simple as a meal. Everyone eats together, guests and staff and clinicians alike, no separate lines or separate tables. While we sat outside with Lisanne, Gould Farm’s executive director, guests and clinicians and their family members kept stopping by to say hi, the way you’d expect neighbors to, not the way you’d expect a clinical program to run. Lisanne also drove us around the farm, since it’s so big that there’s no way to see it all on foot. It’s an incredible space. Guests, staff, and staff families all live there together, side by side, which is really the whole philosophy made visible. We even got to stay overnight in one of their rustic retreat cabins, which was the perfect way to slow down and actually take it all in.
As we reflect on what we learned from our trip, it was really Bob’s story that reminded us that some of the most important pieces of our work doesn’t come from the staff members but from the community. Focusing on creating more support for community engagement, especially around peers connecting with one another is one way we plan to integrate our lessons from the road. The retreat and time at Gould Farm also reinforced the things that we do really well and we will use our experience as motivation to keep doing the hard work. We will continue to provide the time for staff to support each other and care for themselves and practice gratitude in staff meetings and supervision.
We are so grateful for Rayetta and Stacy’s servant leadership. Taking time away from running the day to day operations of Help in the Home requires a lot of planning and preparation. And, staying connected to likeminded providers and leaders in the mental health field is so important to maintaining the integrity of the work we do.
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