Connection as the key to recovery

Tim Bisson, founder of the Sunshine Peer Network, has a passion for bringing people together to support each other.

Tim Bisson, founder of the Sunshine Peer Network

Tim Bisson has always been a social creature. And it’s not hard to understand why.

“After all,” says the 32-year-old founder of the nonprofit Sunshine Peer Network, “I wasn’t alone in the womb.”

Bisson and his twin brother were born three months premature and spent the first three months of their lives in a neonatal intensive care unit in Massachusetts as their parents visited daily from their Connecticut home. Their survival earned them the label “miracle babies,” but it also meant that “right off the bat,” there were lots of pokes and prods and “anxious situations” surrounding their health.

Eventually they returned home to meet their older brother; the three boys made for a lively, rambunctious household. Bisson recalls his as a very happy childhood, fueled by his “big imagination” and filled with lots of activities and roughhousing with his siblings.

But at school he had trouble concentrating. Though he was not diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder, Bisson had to work harder at most things than his peers, including his brother, to whom everything seemed to come easier. The constant comparison was disheartening.

After his parents divorced when he was 13, Bisson began seeing a therapist and was given a vague diagnosis of a “communication deficit.” It didn’t seem to get in the way of his being involved socially. As a member of his high school baseball, football and wrestling teams, and through his involvement with a program called “Upbeat” that involved students in community service, he always had peers to engage with, though perhaps not on the level he might have wished.

“I would socialize with a lot of people and I was pretty popular, but I wasn’t necessarily part of the football player crowd,” he recalls. “I kind of fit in with everybody, but I felt like I didn’t really fit in with anybody.”

Accepted at 18 to the college of his choice, the University of New Haven, he embraced the freedom and opportunities of a new life away from home. That included experimenting with drugs and alcohol. What started as a way to fit in with his college buddies who were drinking and smoking, soon turned into a coping mechanism to deal with the mental health symptoms he began experiencing.

“I started having some schizophrenia symptoms, seeing things and hearing things that weren’t necessarily there,” he says. “I asked clarifying questions from friends and they weren’t seeing or hearing it so I knew it wasn’t real. But some of it was spiritual in nature and it was scary.”

Several traumatic events -- the deaths of grandparents who had helped raise him and to whom he was very close, and a girlfriend relationship gone sour -- ended up triggering more severe symptoms and, ultimately, a suicide attempt. He left school, moved into his mother’s home and began for the first time to see a psychiatrist.

“I started going to therapy and learning more about myself and what was going on with my mental health,” Bisson says. “It was the beginning of the education of myself.”

He continued to experience periods when he felt deeply confused or lost and another psychotic episode landed him in a psychiatric ward. While that is traumatic for many first-time patients, Bisson characterizes his initial stay as “interesting.” He was put on medication that allowed him greater clarity and he especially enjoyed the group therapy sessions there. After his release from the hospital, he continued regularly with both the psychiatric visits and outpatient group sessions.

“I thrived,” he says. “I enjoyed being with people who lived with the things that I did, relating to people and being honest and open about what was going on in my life. That’s where I started feeling more comfortable sharing; just the empathy and being there with each other. Just sitting shoulder to shoulder with people who can truly relate to what I’m going through. That has been really important in my life.”

Eventually he was well enough to return to community college, albeit without a clear sense of direction. He dabbled in a variety of classes, including art and childhood education, ultimately settling on massage therapy school. But he continued to struggle with the symptoms of his illness, and his addiction to “mostly anything I could get my hands on” -- alcohol, pot, cocaine, Ecstasy -- began to escalate. Another “episode” landed him in the hospital again. This time, after getting out he was able to complete his coursework and obtain his certification as a licensed massage therapist, a process that had by then taken more than two years.

Bisson also began going to a mental health wellness center, an outpatient facility in Middletown, CT, where he could “hang out with people who lived with mental health conditions like mine.” There, he found a mentor who was a peer recovery specialist (though at the time he had no idea what that was). His own empathy and concern for others was obvious, so she suggested he become a peer specialist too. He began by answering calls on a “warm line” -- not a hotline dealing with crisis situations, but a phone line offering anyone who called a friendly, listening ear for supportive conversation.

It was at that time he bumped into an older woman at the center who asked him a question. He deferred, saying “Oh, I’m just a patient here” to which she responded, “You’re not just a patient, you’re a person.” As it turned out, she was a doctor and would become one of his trainers as he began to work toward becoming a certified peer specialist in Connecticut.

“I saw myself as a patient because I was going to the wellness center, going to therapy, going to the psychiatrist, working on medication balances… it became my identity,” says Bisson. “What she said was really helpful because it opened my eyes to see that I am a person with the ability to help other people.”

But Bisson’s struggles were not yet over; his continued substance misuse and the loss of a friend to addiction fueled another “difficult time.” For a period he was homeless, moving from place to place, crashing on people’s couches and ultimately living in his car. It was there, on a night of -9 degree wind chill, that he had “a moment of clarity.”

“I don’t know how else to put it,” he says. “I recognized I’d had enough. I recognized I couldn’t keep going on the way I was or I would die. I knew I would.”

So he “did what I do best”; he called his mother, who helped him get into a dual recovery program in Naples, Florida. As previously, Bisson quickly became a standout in group sessions, to the degree that he was given an opportunity to lead his own recovery sessions while still in the facility. After graduating from the program, he moved up the coast to Sarasota, where he hooked up with a psychiatrist who helped him find a balance of medications that has, thus far, allowed him to avoid a major relapse.

He also began attending local 12-step meetings, where he built a support system of older friends, and a local mental health drop in center, where the population was more his age. When the staff at the mental health center recognized his abilities, he offered his services as a volunteer. A day later, after he’d written a plan to show them how he could help lead groups, they gave him a paying job. After earning his Florida certification as a peer specialist, he worked his way up to become Director of Peer Services for the organization.

“It was definitely a blessing to be able to believe I had some purpose and that I could build a career around this,” Bisson says. “There were people who truly believed I had a gift to share with the world, and I believed that too.”

As a board member of the Peer Support Coalition of Florida and a 2021 graduate of the adult leadership program of the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, Bisson traveled within the state and around the country and was exposed to the concept of “peer networks” -- support groups for those who support others. He noticed there was no such group in Sarasota or the surrounding area.

That became the seed for starting the Sunshine Peer Network, an organization with a mission to provide a safe and respectful community where peers can share their experiences and better help the people they serve. Its tagline is: Hope. Inspire. Recover…Together.” Begun in the early days of the Covid pandemic, the meetings were conducted by Zoom.

“We’re able to share our experiences and learn in the professional community, but also to share that lived experience so we can connect and advocate for mental wellness and addiction recovery,” Bisson says. “That’s the idea. Just a community of support and advocacy for recovery.”

Bisson believes the network, a 100 percent peer-led organization, and others like it are as essential as all the other elements of recovery -- psychiatry, therapy, medication, exercise, sleep, diet. Yet that vital element of connection and community is often missing for those who have long been isolated or ostracized due to their illness or addiction.

“I think connection is the opposite of isolation and secrecy and stigma and all that stuff,” he says. “Connection not only with one other person, but a community in general. Support is huge. I get support in many different ways -- my family, my friends in recovery, my mentors, my therapist, my peers and just the community in general. These help me on a daily basis and help me keep the light on for other people.”

Though not everyone is as adept socially as Bisson is, he believes the importance of feeling you are not alone is inestimable and irreplaceable. And he knows that from having lived it.

“I don’t really see it from an objective place, I’m part of it,” he says. “I’m part of this universe and I believe there is a purpose for my life and it’s not me. It’s to be of service to the power greater than myself that got me to this point and also to other people. So I have a passion and a perseverance just to be a support and a voice in the community.

“Gandhi said ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ And that’s something that drives me when I go through a difficult time. Just being open minded, listening to others’ trials and tribulations and being a support to one another. Just doing the next right thing -- whatever that is, just the next right thing.”

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