Recalling Philadelphia's roots as a medical innovator dating to colonial times, city officials outlined yesterday what they described as sweeping changes - some completed, others envisioned - in the treatment of drug addicts and the mentally ill.

Over the last several decades, scientific advances have dramatically improved the lives of the mentally ill, many of whom are also addicted to drugs and sometimes homeless. But those discoveries have not always guided government programs across the nation that are intended to help.

"The question is how do we reorganize our system to deal with the realization that people get better?" said Arthur C. Evans, director of the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Mental Retardation Services.

At a news conference yesterday at a community mental-health center, Evans said some recovering addicts were being trained as peer counselors, allowing them to use their experiences to help others in similar straits. By paying the peer counselors, the program serves another need - getting people back on their feet and staying connected, as opposed to what has been described as the treat-them-and-drop-them approach.

Evans described the new longer-term model as the most sweeping change in the field since hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people were released from institutions during the deinstitutionalization wave of the 1970s.

The changes, which will be phased in over the next two or three years, will be accommodated in his department's $1.4 billion budget, Evans said, noting that peer counselors are not paid like doctors.

The speakers made a point yesterday of describing their new approach as "recovery" rather than "treatment."

Among them was Robert D. Martin, 42, who said he had bipolar disorder and was addicted to crack and living on the streets of Center City in the late 1980s and early '90s. Early in this decade, he said in an interview, his treatment in "partial programs" - "you sat for eight hours a day, then were sent back on the street" - gave him "a glimmer of life."

In mid-2007, just as some of the rethinking was being implemented at Evans' agency, two weeks of intensive training taught Martin how to support recovering addicts, how to run groups, and how to teach people the skills that most Americans take for granted, such as applying for Social Security cards and preparing to go back to school.

He got a job as a peer counselor and has since been promoted. He moved from the street to a shelter to the three-bedroom house he now rents with his wife of two years in Logan. And he just traded in an old clunker for a 2006 Nissan Maxima.

"I'm living life again," Martin said, sitting outside the news conference at the Philadelphia Recovery Community Center at 1701 W. Lehigh Ave.

The site is the first of several planned centers that will offer a range of support groups, counseling, education and social events in communities.

In general, Evans said, the changes that he calls "recovery transformation" - but that may be known to professionals elsewhere as "recovery-oriented systems of care" - are supported by research.

When he was a deputy commissioner of mental health and addiction services in Connecticut, Evans implemented what was described as the first such comprehensive effort, and when he arrived several years ago in Philadelphia, he set about doing the same thing.

"Over the years, it has become clear that people with addiction problems also have other mental-health issues," said Joe Troncale, medical director of the Caron Foundation near Reading, a leading addiction treatment center.

Troncale had no direct knowledge of the changes in Philadelphia but said the integrative or holistic model that was described to him appeared to be the direction in which behavioral health was heading.

Philadelphia, he said, had been known as a leader in humane mental health services going back to the beginning of the nation, when Dr. Benjamin Rush sought to classify forms of mental illness and wrote the first American textbook on psychiatry.