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Community Support
About the Program
Community Support Programs
Each year, approximately 5.5 million Americans are disabled by serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness, and severe depressive disorders. Through its Community Support Programs, CMHS provides funding to States and community groups to improve the effectiveness of mental health systems of care for adults with serious mental illnesses. CMHS Community Support Programs foster integrated systems of community services and rehabilitation, identify the best and most cost-efficient ways to help people who have serious mental illnesses, and help States and communities put consumer-driven methods into practice.
Through its Community Support Programs, CMHS:
Collaborates with other Federal agencies on the funding of studies relating to the delivery of mental health/substance abuse services for older adults through primary care systems and the evaluation of models to improve service delivery. Initiatives are comparing the costs and outcomes of treating clients in a primary care setting versus referring clients to outside mental health specialists.
Collaborates with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's other two Centers on studies of integrated treatment systems for women with mental health and substance abuse disorders who are victims of violence.
Conducts studies to determine the most effective and cost-efficient services for helping persons with severe mental illness find and keep jobs. Studies examine outcomes such as employment days and salary, level of functioning, quality of life, utilization of mental health services, and program costs.
Studies managed care's effects on the use, cost, and outcomes of mental health and substance abuse services for consumers and their families.
Collaborates on studies to test the effectiveness of jail diversion programs for individuals with co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorders.
Evaluates mental health service programs operated by mental health consumers to assess their effectiveness in aiding rehabilitation and recovery.
CMHS then take the knowledge gained from these studies and transfers it to the field by:
Funding community action grants to assist State and community groups in adopting exemplary mental health service delivery practices that meet local needs. Funded practices include: integrated mental health and substance abuse services, assertive community treatment services, supported employment programs, and "wrap-around" services for children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances. The program has a special Hispanic initiative that focuses on mental health and/or substance abuse practices in Hispanic communities.
Collaborating with the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to support two national rehabilitation research and training centers for people with mental illness.
The CMHS Employment Intervention Demonstration Program is just one example of a CMHS Community Support Program that shows great promise for people with mental illness. The project has been evaluating models of employment supports and services for people with serious mental illness in eight States, with the ultimate goal of helping individuals to find and maintain employment. More than 1,600 participants have been enrolled in the program. Implementation of the program has shown that people with serious mental illness are employable and can maintain independent employment, that work motivation is high, and that an integrated team approach locates jobs almost four times more often than traditional approaches. About 50 percent of participants who are unemployed at the time of enrollment are employed within one year of enrolling in the program. In addition, more than half the participants in the employment program who received vocational services for at least 12 months are employed, compared to an overall national employment rate of 26 percent among a representative sample of persons with severe disabilities.
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