Recovery and Community Residential Services: The Case for Supported Housing
Housing is a prominent need and an essential component in the community support system for persons with serious mental illness. Emanated from the principle of recovery, there is a growing emphasis on independence, empowerment, and normalization as the guiding values in the design of housing and residential services for consumers of mental health services. Based on a 6-year research partnership between the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health, this presentation will address recovery as a pivotal theme in housing and community residential services. The research partnership focuses on understanding factors influencing community integration of consumers in supported housing programs and maintenance of housing tenure in such residential setting. The presentation will elaborate on the following topics: opportunities for community integration rendered by the housing and support environments of supported housing programs; patterns and levels of community participation of supported housing consumers; maintenance of housing tenure and departure from supported housing programs; implications for system transformation in building a recovery- centered community residential services system.
Y.L. Irene Wong, PhD has, in the past five years, been principal investigator and co-investigator of three federally funded research projects covering the areas of mental health, housing, and homelessness. Her research focuses on community integration of persons with serious mental illness and factors associated with residential instability among homeless mentally ill persons in permanent supportive housing. Through her research, Dr. Wong has established a long-standing and effective collaborative relationship with professionals in the mental health services system in Philadelphia. She is a member of the UPenn Collaborative, a five-year Rehabilitation Research & Training Center (RRTC) promoting community integration of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. The Collaborative is an RRTC project funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research with the goal of leading the field in bringing community integration research into practice.
