Speculative Innovations for Helping People With Serious Mental Illness Fall 1999

If there were no financial or legal restraints, what parts of the mental health system would you change in hopes of improving the lives of people with serious mental illnesses? This volume of New Directions for Mental Health Services posed this question to a consumer, a parent, researchers, teachers, administrators, and clinicians. Their creative and insightful answers point the way to a more comforting and consumer-oriented mental health system for the future, and provide some innovative ideas that could be implemented now. The authors address working conditions for mental health professionals, the benefits of pets to people with mental illness, and strategies to counteract the isolation in which many people with mental illness live. They also offer practical steps that parents can take to make sure that their mentally ill adult children will have some emotional and economic care after the parents? deaths, and they discuss interventions at both the domestic and community levels that could reduce the occurrence of schizophrenia and enhance the quality of life for sufferers.This is the 83rd issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Mental Health Services.Wasow, Mona is the author of 'Speculative Innovations for Helping People With Serious Mental Illness Fall 1999' with ISBN 9780787914325 and ISBN 0787914320.