Planning for New Center Research Initiative Continues

The Center has submitted a grant proposal for an Advanced Center for Intervention and Services Research, rethinking the precepts of social recovery from serious mental illness, and applying capability theory to research on innovative practice. This proposal draws on and extends the Center’s eleven years of prior and productive work on the lives and needs of people who use public sector services in a highly fragmented “de facto” system that has yet to figure out how to operate in a coordinated fashion.

Mary Jane Alexander, Ph.D. will direct the new Center, with co-directors Carole Siegel, Ph.D. and Kim Hopper, Ph.D. Other key players include Dixianne Penney, Dr. P.H., Judy Samuels Ph.D., Kris Jones, Ph.D. and Gary Haugland, MA. The new initiative will support active and participatory partnerships among researchers, providers, consumers and public policy makers that break new ground in thinking about social recovery from serious mental illness from the standpoint of capability theory. Proposed research projects that address issues such as housing, employment, jail diversion and parenting seek to expand traditional approaches in mental health services research in order to recognize that the lived experience of consumers is not bounded by the systems that serve them. The Center challenges its partners to envision a community mental health system in which the interactions and structures that touch recipients’ lives support and encourage recovery and development. The Center’s scientifically sound and relevant research will also develop new methods and measures that support stakeholders’ efforts at innovation. The overall goal of this new project is to produce research that improves the life chances of people with serious mental illness who live in difficult, socially complex settings.

The Center will continue to be a part of the NYS Office of Mental Health and based at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg NY. While sustaining our formal alliances with academic partners in psychology, public service and social welfare at New York University and the University at Albany, SUNY, the Center will add other state and local public sector policy and practice partners, innovative local service providers, consumer-providers and consumers representing voice of service recipients. Consistent with the visions of the Institute of Medicine and the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, Center partners will develop strategies to disseminate research nationally on evidence-based care that is consumer centered.