Word: ills
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead of abandoning the recovering mentally ill when they leave the hospital, psychosocial rehabilitation nudges them toward jobs, apartments and increased responsibility. Individuals are assigned to treatment teams composed of psychiatric professionals and "life-skills" specialists, who see them as often as three times a day or as seldom as once a month, depending on need. These teams monitor medication and offer both practical help and psychological support in getting former patients back into the working world...
Awakenings, with 12 chapters in the New York City area, is a program aimed at "robust responders"--medical jargon for high-functioning individuals. Founder Ken Steele, who for 32 years wandered across America homeless and schizophrenic, feels that the most formidable task for the mentally ill is overcoming the social stigma. "The public's synonym for us is still psycho," he says. "We are feared and misunderstood." Partly to counter this, individuals with mental illness call themselves "consumers"--an emotionally neutral word meant to suggest people who consume medications and services associated with psychiatric disability. A voting effort, for example...
Programs like Manhattan's Fast Track to Employment work with employers to help the recovering mentally ill find jobs. At least 50 firms have signed on, and most seem satisfied. "We had anxieties at first," admits RDS Delivery Service co-owner David Zogby, "but customers called to salute us." Says George Castaldo of American Postcard Co. of his new hires: "They come 20 minutes early in rain, snow or cold, and they give...
...urine when she got a career idea that would benefit herself as well as people like her. She enrolled first in college and then in law school while homeless. In 1985, she started INCube (short for incubation), a New York City agency run by the recovering mentally ill that helps others start businesses. "We do business as well as or better than the mainstream," says Kravitz. "It's a big secret." INCube has helped start 300 businesses over a decade and counts 176 still going, from Courage Communications, whose crews install pay telephones in Manhattan, to DJ Unexpected, which provides...
...than on social rehabilitation. Ruth Hughes argues that the profession's "belief system" still contains "the idea that people with schizophrenia never get better." Insurance companies have been slow to be convinced that these programs work and will ultimately save money. And many employers still resist hiring the mentally ill. American Postcard's Castaldo recalls telling a fellow businessman "how well I'm doing with handicapped people." The man was interested, Castaldo relates, "but when I mentioned mental health, a wall came down...