The Mental Health and Social Welfare Research Group (MHSWRG) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers established to link policy to practice and person outcomes in the mental health field. The name of the group derives from its mission of improving the life situation of people with mental disabilities. While psychological disturbance plays havoc with one's internal environment, it's effects are largely experienced in the "real world" -- the world of work, social and community relationships, and in the quality of a person's life situation. It is the nexus between an individual's life situation, the mental health services designed to help the individual deal with their psychological disability, and the programs and policies designed to make these services effective that is the focus of the research effort of MHSWRG. While policy initiatives have made significant differences in the field, they have suffered in their implementation by lack of specification of their relationship to outcomes actually experienced by people with psychological disabilities. For twenty-five years, with the support of the NIMH, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Fund, this group has contributed to the knowledge of how to link policy and practice to improved person outcomes.
Five major areas of research have included a twenty-year investigation of residential care, a seventeen year study of general hospital psychiatric emergency room care, psycho-active medication prescription practices, services to the homeless, and self help mental health services.
For a list of selected publications from the group click on one of the following main research areas:
PSYCHIATRIC EMERGENCY SERVICE: DANGEROUSNESS, CIVIL COMMITMENT, QUALITY OF CARE AND MANAGED CARE
Managed care's emphasis on linking clinical process to patient outcomes is believed to have the potential to improve both (Winegar,1992). The overall goal of this research is to improve our understanding of decision making in the psychiatric emergency service(PES) so as to insure better quality of care and patient outcomes in a managed care environment. We have developed a reliable and valid assessment package and a model of PES decision making. Both have shown great utility in predicting process and outcome characteristics of the PES evaluation. Given these tools, we are now able to address a number of pressing questions about PES evaluations under managed care.
In these studies we have observed 782 patient evaluations in nine California PESs. In addition to documenting the evaluation process, information on the patient's evaluation and post-PES experience was obtained from patient mental health, social service, criminal justice and death certificate records. An eighteen month follow-up on patient records was also completed to check for major adverse outcomes(death, violent crime & recidivism to the PES).
PSYCHOACTIVE DRUG PRESCRIPTION PRACTICES
HOMELESSNESS
Homelessness is studied in the context of social responsibility for the poor. Using both ethnographic and survey methodology the life situations of homeless individuals are described. The building social margin provides a theoretical framework for understanding coping efforts and programmatic suggestions.
EMPOWERMENT AND SELF HELP
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