Research in Community and Mental Health – serie

This is the tenth volume in a series on research in community and mental health.

Research in Community and Mental Health

People with mental illness in the criminal justice system are a vexing problem in many countries. Efforts to cope with this problem have taken a number of forms. Some focus on the expansion of existing community mental health treatment and support systems. Other, more recently developed approaches, such as jail diversion programmes and mental health courts, seek to move offenders with mental illness charged with "low-level" crimes from the criminal justice system to the mental health system. Others target offenders with mental illness who are being released from correctional settings, and attempt to facilitate their re-entry into the community and mental health service system. Whether and to what extent any of these efforts achieve their goals remains a significant question for researchers from a range of disciplines and for actors and stakeholders from various sectors of the mental health and criminal justice systems. The chapters presented in this volume explore key issues in this area, including the role of mental illness in criminal justice involvement, the effectiveness of psychopharmacologic and traditional community mental health treatment modalities, and the conceptualization and potential efficacy and effectiveness of new community-based approaches for serving offenders with mental illness.

Over the centuries work for persons with severe mental illness has ranged from virtual slave labor to institutional peonage to contemporary rehabilitative programs that seek to assist individuals in re-entering the workplace. How best to do this remains an open question however, and has captured the attention of researchers from a broad range of disciplines, from rehabilitation research to labor economics. This volume provides a sense of this diversity and an overview of research perspectives in this critically important area. Included are chapters discussing important new theoretical frameworks, issues in the evaluation of programmatic efforts to enhance employment opportunities, and discussions grounded in large scale social and economic perspectives.

Research on mental health services for children and adolescents has become a vibrant subspecialty within the larger field of mental health services research. This research program experienced a somewhat later start than that focusing on adults, and faces a set of issues and challenges that are both different and in many ways more complex. The served population itself is bounded by infancy and the late teen years, and includes all age groups in between. This developmental spectrum naturally necessitates there being a correspondingly diverse array of mental health services. The disorders experienced by children and adolescents can become apparent in the family, the school, the pediatricians office, the social welfare agency or the courts, and the settings in which services may be provided can include any or all of these, as well as numerous others. Indeed, it has become standard practice in discussing mental health service delivery for this population to emphasize systems of care, although identifying the outlines and boundaries of such systems can itself be a daunting task. The chapters in this volume singly and collectively reflect the richness and complexity of research in this burgeoning and vitally important area and also highlight the novel conceptual and methodological approaches researchers in this field are taking in tackling its most critical issues. It focuses on the unique challenges related to mental health services for children; it examines the different settings (school, home, community, etc.) where treatment and diagnosis may take place; and it reviews literature in the area and discusses the creative approaches taken by researchers.

Research in Community and Mental Health

Research in Community and Mental Health

Research in Community and Mental Health

This volume of "Research in Community and Mental Health" is divided into two main sections: social networks within and between organizations and social networks and interpersonal relationships.