In 1987, mental health consumers across California conducted their own survey, the Well-Being Project, asking what actually helps or hurts people who have been labeled mentally ill. Jean Campbell, Ph.D., who led that research and later directed the Program in Consumer Studies and Training at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, wrote and narrates this film for the California Network of Mental Health Clients. The survey's statistics get a human face here: people who have gone through psychiatric hospitalization and traditional treatment describe what worked, what didn't, and what their daily lives look like now. Between interviews, the camera visits peer-run programs, services designed and staffed by people with psychiatric histories rather than by clinicians. The film's argument is built into its structure, treating the people on screen as the authorities on their own condition rather than as case studies. Made at the tail end of the 1980s, it stands as an early document of the consumer/survivor movement in mental health, told entirely in the first person.