The National Empowerment Center (NEC) is a peer-run, federally funded organisation based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. For more than thirty years it has been one of the most consistent voices in the United States arguing that people who have been psychiatric patients are uniquely qualified to help shape mental health care — and to deliver it. If you have heard the phrase "nothing about us without us" used in mental health policy, much of its US currency comes from people associated with the NEC.
The National Empowerment Center is a peer-run organisation that promotes recovery-oriented, peer-led approaches to serious mental illness through training, technical assistance, and advocacy.
Origins
NEC was founded in 1992 with funding from what is now the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Its co-founders included Daniel B. Fisher, a psychiatrist who himself was hospitalised with schizophrenia in his twenties before going on to medical school, and Judi Chamberlin, the author of On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System (1978) and one of the founding figures of the US psychiatric survivor movement.
Chamberlin had been hospitalised against her will in the 1960s and described those experiences as deeply harmful. She spent the rest of her life arguing for peer-run alternatives. Fisher's own recovery, and his decision to disclose it as a practising psychiatrist, gave the organisation a particular kind of credibility — both inside and outside professional circles.
What it does
NEC's work falls into four broad areas:
1. Training and curriculum
NEC develops and delivers training programs for peer support specialists, clinicians, and family members. Its best-known curriculum is Emotional CPR (eCPR), a brief training in connecting with people in emotional crisis using non-clinical, peer-style techniques: presence, listening, and supporting the person's own coping. eCPR has been taught in roughly 40 countries.
2. Technical assistance
NEC consults with state mental health authorities, peer-run agencies, and federal partners on how to design recovery-oriented systems of care, integrate peer specialists, and meaningfully include people with lived experience in policy.
3. Advocacy
NEC has been a consistent voice for civil rights in mental health — opposing unnecessary coercion, promoting psychiatric advance directives, and pushing for peer respite houses and other alternatives to hospitalisation.
4. Resources for individuals and families
The NEC website hosts free recovery materials, recorded lectures, and the long-running PACE/Recovery training, which has reached hundreds of thousands of people through its dissemination by state mental health systems.
Connection to broader US peer movement
NEC is part of a small set of federally funded national peer organisations that grew out of SAMHSA's mid-1990s commitment to consumer-led technical assistance. Sister organisations include the National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery, and the Café TA Center. Together they have shaped the integration of peer support specialists into US Medicaid-funded behavioural health.
Daniel Fisher's contribution
Fisher's writing and lectures have been particularly influential for the way they bridge clinical and lived experience. He argues that recovery from serious mental illness is not the rare exception that older psychiatry believed it to be, and points to long-term outcome studies — including the Vermont Longitudinal Study by Courtenay Harding — that found roughly two-thirds of people with severe mental illness achieved meaningful recovery when followed across decades. His book Heartbeats of Hope (2017) lays out the framework.
Judi Chamberlin's legacy
Chamberlin died in 2010, but her influence on the movement remains foundational. She insisted on a key distinction: the difference between peer support as a co-opted role inside a clinical system, and peer leadership, in which people with lived experience actually run organisations and set their direction. NEC tries to embody the second model.
Emotional CPR, in more detail
eCPR has three components — C (connect), P (empower), R (revitalise). It is designed to be teachable to non-clinicians in a few hours and is used in workplaces, schools, faith communities, and police departments. It is not a substitute for clinical assessment of suicide risk, but it offers a framework for the moments before clinical care is involved — moments where most people in crisis spend most of their time.
What the NEC is not
- It is not anti-psychiatry. NEC's positions are critical of coercion and pessimism, not of treatment itself.
- It is not a service provider. NEC does not offer ongoing clinical care or take individual referrals.
- It is not a crisis service. People in crisis should call 988 in the US.
- It is not a national membership organisation in the way NAMI is. Its work is largely training, technical assistance, and advocacy.
Resources from NEC
- The power2u.org website hosts free articles, videos, and trainings.
- Lists of peer-run organisations and recovery-oriented services.
- Materials on WRAP, advance directives, and crisis alternatives.
- Information on becoming an eCPR trainer.
For people newer to the recovery movement
If you have a recent schizophrenia diagnosis and have only been exposed to clinical descriptions of it, NEC's materials offer a different kind of orientation. They take seriously the possibility of full recovery, the importance of agency, and the value of relationships with others who have been through the same things. None of this is in conflict with good clinical care — but it adds something clinical care alone tends to miss.
For related reading, see peer support specialists, Patricia Deegan, WRAP plans, and becoming a peer support specialist.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.