The proposed project will extend research on the effects of client support and representation (CSR) services. Subjects are 488 people discharged into from chronic and acute mental health care providers. The current research has established a large-scale field experiment with random assignment to one of three conditions. Subjects in the CSR condition receive an intervention designed to facilitate the subject's efforts to safeguard legal rights and to improve personal living conditions; the """"""""greeter"""""""" condition provides a friendly relationship to the subject as a placebo control; the no-new-treatment condition serves as a baseline. Subjects are interviewed four times concerning psychiatric symptomatology, self-esteem, social adjustment, and a number of other process and outcome variables. The proposed project will gather and integrate relevant additional data, and pursue new topics of analysis. Specifically, the project will support completion of one-year follow-up interviews with 138 subjects precluded by the scheduled end of the current study. Collection of additional data will include exhaustive records of rehospitalization obtained from a thorough canvas of service providers; clinical ratings of adjustment for approximately one third of the sample; and extensive mental health service utilization data from county records. The project will support integration of the new data with previously collected data, and statistical analyses will be applied to the augmented data set. In addition, subjects have provided extensive information on the number, frequency and intensity of their social relationships and on receipt of social support. Analyses of these data will be informative concerning both the social networks of chronically mentally ill people, and the psychological effects of social support.
| Freddolino, P P; Moxley, D P (1992) Refining an advocacy model for homeless people coping with psychiatric disabilities. Community Ment Health J 28:337-52 |
| Freddolino, P P; Moxley, D P; Fleishman, J A (1989) An advocacy model for people with long-term psychiatric disabilities. Hosp Community Psychiatry 40:1169-74 |
