Let's Talk About It: Mental Health and UWT: UWT Community Stories
Stories from the UWT Community
Coming Soon
Featured Titles
Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness
An urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.
Call Number: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2018
Improving Mental Health Care: the Global Challenge
Written by many of the world's leading practitioners in the delivery of mental health care, this book clearly presents the results of scientific research about care and treatment for people with mental illness in community settings. The book presents clear accounts of what is known, extensively referenced, with critical appraisals of the strength of the evidence and the robustness of the conclusions that can be drawn. Improving Mental Health Care adds to our knowledge of the challenge and the solutions and stands to make a significant contribution to global mental health.
Call Number: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Fountain House: Creating Community in Mental Health Practice
Often people with mental illness feel alone in society, with no place to go and little hope. Their isolation can be further perpetuated through typical approaches to treatment, such as case management and psychotherapy. Since 1948, the Fountain House "working community" has worked to address the isolation and social stigmatization faced by people with mental illness. This volume describes in detail its evidence-based, cost-effective, and replicable model, which produces substantive outcomes in employment, schooling, housing, and general wellness. Through an emphasis on personal choice, professional and patient collaboration, and, most important, "the need to be needed," Fountain House demonstrates that people with serious mental illness can not only live but also contribute and thrive in society. The authors also explore the evolution of Fountain House practice, which is grounded in social work and psychiatry and informs current strength-based and recovery methodologies. Its inherent humanity, social inclusivity, message of personal empowerment, and innovation--a unique approach on behalf of people suffering from mental illness--have led to the paradigm's worldwide adoption.
Call Number: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Featured Titles
Space, Place and Mental Health
There is a strong case today for a specific focus on mental public health and its relation to social and physical environments. From a public health perspective, we now appreciate the enormous significance of mental distress and illness as causes of disability and impairment. Stress and anxiety, and other mental illnesses are linked to risks in the environment. This book questions how and why the social and physical environment matters for mental health and psychological wellbeing in human populations. While putting forward a number of different points of view, there is a particular emphasis on ideas and research from health geography, which conceptualises space and place in ways that provide a distinctive focus on the interactions between people and their social and physical environment. The book begins with an overview of a rich body of theory and research from sociology, psychology, social epidemiology, social psychiatry and neuroscience, considering arguments concerning 'mind-body dualism', and presenting a conceptual framework for studying how attributes of 'space' and 'place' are associated with human mental wellbeing. It goes on to look in detail at how our mental health is associated with material, or physical, aspects of our environment (such as 'natural' and built landscapes), with social environments (involving social relationships in communities), and with symbolic and imagined spaces (representing the personal, cultural and spiritual meanings of places). These relationships are shown to be complex, with potential to be beneficial or hazardous for mental health. The final chapters of the book consider spaces of care and the implications of space and place for public mental health policy, offering a broader view of how mental health might be improved at the population level. With boxed case studies of specific research ideas and methods, chapter summaries and suggestions for introductory reading, this book offers a comprehensive introduction which will be valuable for students of health geography, public health, sociology and anthropology of health and illness. It also provides an interdisciplinary review of the literature, by the author and by other writers, to frame a discussion of issues that challenge more advanced researchers in these fields.
Call Number: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2010
The Open Door: Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness in the Era of Community Treatment
The Open Door: Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness in the Era of Community Treatment explains how and why homelessness among the mentally ill has persisted over the past 35 years, despite policy and program initiatives to end it. This ten-chapter book chronicles the unintended rise ofhomelessness in the wake of far-reaching post-World War II mental health care reforms, and highlights the key role of advocacy in spurring a governmental response to homelessness. The author provides a comprehensive, carefully documented "state of the science" on homelessness, reviews criticalissues in managing severe mental illness in the community setting, and presents evidence of the effectiveness of service and housing interventions that have brought stability to the lives of many. Finally, the book reviews the role of homelessness prevention, a recovery orientation, and the promiseof early treatment of psychotic disorders to facilitate greater social inclusion and community participation.In addition to providers of housing and services to the homeless mentally ill, this text will appeal to policymakers, mental health professionals, and students of public health and social sciences.
Call Number: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2017
Recovery in Mental Illness: Broadening our Understanding of Wellness
In the early 20th century, when the course of serious illness was first described, scientists offered little hope of recovery for people diagnosed with illnesses like schizophrenia. They were told to expect only continuing psychotic symptoms and progressive dementia and were given no hope of working and living independently. Since then, research has suggested more positive outcomes. In this volume, aimed at clinicians and advocates for the seriously mentally ill, Ruth O. Ralph and Patrick W. Corrigan bring together the available data on the phenomenon of recovery and suggest that various degrees of recovery are more realistic than commonly thought. Recovery in Mental Illness: Broadening our Understanding of Wellness explores what recovery means from various perspectives, including sociological models as well as qualitative studies that incorporate mental health consumers' subjective experiences. The mental health professional seeking to better understand the nature of recovery as well as what interventions and services might enhance well being and quality of life, will find a rich and nuanced discussion of recovery as process, outcome, and natural occurrence, and an examination of
Call Number: WM 400 R311 2005Publication Date: 2005
