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Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation to host international conference
By David J. Craig
Today, more than 30 years after U.S. mental health care providers began developing ways to help people with serious psychiatric disabilities without locking them away in institutions, practitioners in many underdeveloped countries are scrambling to build large mental hospitals.
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| Sargent professors Courtenay Harding, Marianne Farkas, and William Anthony (from left) will participate in an international conference on psychiatric rehabilitation hosted by CPR in Boston from October 24 to 26. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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That is unfortunate, says Marianne Farkas, because research has shown
that strong extended families and tight-knit neighborhoods -- precisely
the sort of informal social networks that many underdeveloped nations
already have solidly in place -- are ideal for helping people with mental
illnesses recover.
“Developing nations shouldn’t be building mental health care
systems around hospitals, because people with mental illness can recover
and reclaim their lives in ways that the West didn’t understand
a few years ago,” says Farkas, a research associate professor of
rehabilitation counseling at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation
Sciences. “The best way to assist recovery is to deliver services
to people with disabilities while they’re a part of their community.”
Clinical practices for assisting recovery from around the world will be
the focus of an international conference hosted by SAR’s Center
for Psychiatric Rehabilitation (CPR), entitled Innovations in Recovery
and Rehabilitation: the Decade of the Person, October 24 to 26 at the
Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. The conference, which is open to the public,
will feature 700 mental health administrators, practitioners, educators,
researchers, and consumers from nine countries, including India, Sweden,
Australia, and Belgium. It is cosponsored by the World Health Organization
and is coordinated in collaboration with the Consumer Organization National
Technical Assistance Center, which is based in West Virginia.
The conference is the largest ever hosted by CPR, which was one of the
first centers in the world to research recovery from serious mental illnesses
such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder when it was founded in 1979.
In addition to conducting leading research, the center provides training
in life and work skills to people with psychiatric disabilities, with
the aim of helping them take charge of their lives.
“This conference is an indication of the global impact that the
Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation has had,” says William Anthony,
a SAR professor of rehabilitation counseling and executive director of
CPR. “I think our greatest contribution has been to show how people
with mental illness can return to work or to school, no matter what their
backgrounds or symptoms.
“The conference is interesting in that it will have more than 80
people who are participating as mental health professionals and who also
are or have been consumers of mental health services,” he continues.
“When we began our work at this center, that would have been inconceivable,
because people with mental illnesses were not given the opportunity to
recover.”
Anthony will deliver a keynote address, he says, on “the need to
tear down the walls between mental health professionals and those we serve.”
Too often, “we think of our clients as having broken brains and
as being different from other people, when, in fact, they have the same
hopes and dreams as anybody else.” Also delivering a keynote address
will be Courtenay Harding, a SAR professor of rehabilitation counseling
and director of SAR’s Institute for the Study of Human Resilience.
Farkas, who also is director of the training division and international
division at CPR, says that American mental health professionals in attendance
will have plenty to learn from mental health care practices in other parts
of the world.
“North Americans are at the forefront of helping clients develop
skills, but the Europeans have better systems for helping clients get
support in the community,” she says. “That might include engaging
neighbors in a small town so that they accept a person with mental illness
as a part of the community, and helping a client learn to develop informal
social supports for themselves. People with psychiatric disabilities tend
to have very few contacts in their community outside of the mental health
system and their fellow patients, and in North America, we’re just
beginning to grapple with the challenge of changing that.”
18 October 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations