| Navigation |
| Search |
| Newsletter Sign Up |
|
|
| Your CI Forum |
| Join Your CI Forum Now! Bulletin Board, Information Exchange, and more. forgot your password?
|
Over the past three decades, mental health housing has become integrated with other, more traditional mental health services in various configurations of different living arrangements and service delivery systems. Mental health services-based housing operates under the premise that the combination of permanent housing and flexible, individualized, and accessible support services are an effective way to maintain residential stability, facilitate improved psychosocial outcomes, and foster maximum integration with the larger community. However, approaches to achieving these outcomes vary.
In the wake of homelessness and its impact on people with psychiatric disabilities, housing has become a central facet of the community integration process and prerequisite to successful treatment and rehabilitation interventions. Recent conceptual frameworks have acknowledged the need for "a sophisticated match of housing structures with social and rehabilitative services" (Boyer 1987, 71). Furthermore, suitable and adequate housing has been called both a "pain-avoidance need" that is necessary for a mentally ill individual's psychological well-being (Earls & Nelson 1988), and a key ecological determinant in the quality and degree of community integration. Such theoretical shifts reflect the predominant view now held by mental health professionals where housing, combined with professional and social network support, is the core of the rehabilitation process for people with psychiatric disabilities living in the community.
Yet presenting this approach to housing as a unified technique belies fundamental differences within this movement in which the ambivalence toward integrating housing and mental health services re-emerges. Two distinct approaches exist toward configuring and juxtaposing housing and services. Despite substantial differences in perspectives on mental health treatment and how to best facilitate community integration, they share a common goal of seeking to enable people with mental illnesses to function in (and as part of) a broader community. One approach, residential treatment, modifies a traditional medical perspective by locating community-based housing together with services, while the second approach, supported housing, uses "normal" community housing as its model and keeps housing separate from mental health services.
Return to All Issues