Mark Ragins, MD – Long Bio

A ROAD TO RECOVERY

Mark Ragins, MD, is the Medical Director at the MHA Village Integrated Service Agency in Long Beach, California, an award winning model of recovery based mental health care.  He has worked there since its beginning in 1990 as a psychiatrist for the adult service coordination teams, the Homeless Assistance Program, the Transition Age Youth Academy, and now the Welcoming Team.  His practice and vision have been grounded in more than 20 years of ongoing clinical work with some of the most underserved and difficult to engage people in our community.

Over the years he has been very active in promoting system change focusing on integrated services, rehabilitation, and recovery for people with serious mental illnesses.  Countless numbers of people have come to experience the work being done at the Village first hand and Mark has traveled to  over 40 different counties in California since the passage of the Mental Health Services Act training thousands of people and catalyzing recovery based transformation.  He is a consultant to the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, the most extensive local effort anywhere to implement recovery based practice.  He has given hundreds of presentations and lectures to wide ranging audiences and spoken at numerous conferences nationally and internationally.

His writings include a short book, A Road to Recovery, a textbook chapter Recovery and Community Mental Health as well as numerous other published and unpublished articles with a sizable audience, available at www.mhavillage.org.  His writings are posted on a variety of websites including official government websites, professional publications, national advocacy organizations, local mental health reference guides, self-help websites, and even included in the L.A. Times and Steve Lopez’s book The Soloist.  He is a creator of MHALA’s Milestones of Recovery Scale (MORS) and The Recovery Culture Progress Report tools.  He also consults with Entertainment Industries Council, Inc. regarding the portrayal of people with mental illnesses in the media.

Over the years Mark has won a number of awards including being the co-winner of the American Psychiatric Association’s Arnold van Ameringen Award for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in 1995.  The MHA Village won the Institute for Psychiatric Services’ Gold Medal Award as the large program of the year in 2000.  In 2006 he was selected as a distinguished fellow by the American Psychiatric Association. In 2011 USPRA gave him their John Beard award for his outstanding lifetime contribution to psychiatric rehabilitation. In 2013 NAMI California selected him as their recovery practitioner of the year.

 

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