The general aim of the present thesis is to investigate needs of support and service in clients with long-term mental disabilities living in the community. A further aim is to study changes in these client needs during a 3.5-year follow-up. A questionnaire, The Need of Support and Service Questionnaire (NSSQ), was developed to provide staffs in psychiatric care and social services with a brief instrument to assess how their clients live in the community and to identify their needs. The results are based on 1,759 clients. The prevalence of clients in urban and rural areas was 6.4/1,000 and 4.5/1,000 inhabitants, respectively. The clients living in the urban setting were more frequently male, older, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and needed more support in activities of daily living than rural clients. Clients identified by staff in psychiatric care only were more often living with a partner, with children living at home and more often had a rehabilitation allowance than clients identified by social services staff. In clients assessed by both organizations similar needs at a group level were identified. However, agreements were lower at the individual level. Although clients reported fewer needs than staff in psychiatric care, the reported needs were in the same areas. A majority of the clients with unmet needs of service at baseline had their needs met at the 3.5-year follow-up. New unmet needs were also identified at the follow-up, however. The results demonstrate less improvement in clients with schizophrenia as compared with non-schizophrenic clients. In conclusion, needs of support and service present a dynamic process and both psychiatric care and social services should critically evaluate assessments of these needs.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-167).

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

No description available.

This study focused on youths’ experience of receiving school-based mental health services and community-based mental health services. This qualitative study utilized a sample of eight girls and boys, ages 15-17 years old, who attended school within the district of Timmins. Data was collected using individual interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results of the study revealed benefits to services, limitations to services, and some recommendations for changes to services. This research helped to explain what the participants, who have had experiences with mental health services, thought about the services they have had; it also provided some recommendations the participants made for changes to the mental health services based on their experiences. The conclusion of this study involved a connection between this study and social work practice, and offered suggestions for future research in the field of children’s mental health services.

This thesis explores how concepts of "adolescence" and "adolescent psychopathology" have become salient among medical and lay communities in Pelotas, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state. The concept of adolescence emerged throughout the 20th century in Western Europe and North America from various specialized fields, including evolutionary medicine, psychiatry, and developmental psychology. Within these sub-fields, adolescence came to refer to a transitional phase in the life span, and specifically, to the psychopathologies and psychological opportunities ensuing from what could potentially become a life-altering transformation. In the past two decades, this concept of adolescence has been adopted by a number of global health agencies, who depict the adolescent phase as an opportunity for addressing the underlying causes of multiple psychopathologies and accordingly, for improving the developmental "health" of nations. Concepts and practices relating to the management of adolescent psychopathology readily took hold in Pelotas in the 1990s, not only because local professional communities have been seeped in a psychoanalytic tradition dating back to the early 20th century, but also because of a recent growing community-based health care movement that prompted the expansion of publicly funded mental health services. This expansion widened definitions of "therapy" to include preventive care and social mobilization, and impacted significantly the identity, social role and political inclinations of practitioners. Due to these changes, psychiatrists and psychologists are showing greater interest in adolescent patients and their various common mental disorders, including "aggressiveness," nervos, anxiety, and learning and school achievement problems. Yet several social and class struggles ensue when practitioners, many of whom seek to maintain their psychodynamic models relatively intact, shift the focus of their work f

This research presents a consumer evaluation of the delivery and aspects of services provided at three community run mental health centres. The purpose of this research is to describe the satisfaction levels of consumers with mental health service delivery in Durban, with a view to using this information to improve the services in future for quality assurance. The current investigation takes a look at how a comprehensive community mental health centre is perceived by its consumers. The subjects totalling one hundred and eleven clients who were attending psychiatric community health clinics during the study period. Using client self report questionnaires, the study investigates clients' perceptions of several aspects of their clinical care in community mental health service. In addition to assessing the clients' level of overall satisfaction and degree of acceptability of the services to the clients, the researcher was also interested in determining the expectation of consumers and how the clients perceived the effectiveness of health care service delivery. Additional information provided was the clients' views of the quality and outcome oftherapy. As further measures of the clinic's effectiveness and client satisfaction, questions relative to other help seeking actions, future behaviour in similar situations and recommendations ofthe clinic to others were asked. In addition to asking a wide variety of satisfaction-related questions, sociodemographic detail (i.e. age, gender, race, educational level, employment status, length of visits to the clinic) were asked. Most participants were unemployed men. Analysis of findings indicated that most participants were satisfied with the health service provided. Recommendations were, however, further made for improving quality of care and towards additional studies in other settings to include appropriate proportions of all racial groups in South Africa. / Thesis (M.Cur.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2002.

This thesis investigates different spaces in the lives of a group of adults living with long-term mental illness in Montreal. In particular, it is interested in exploring the role and functions of an alternative mental health resource that they all attend, using their narratives as the basis of meaning construction. My intention is to illuminate the complex interplay of identity, social participation, and physical place itself in the 'space' of experience for individuals. The way that a description of one of these elements is often in relationship with the other two, and that these connections can be useful in understanding descriptions of experiences by individuals, which, in David Morris' terms occur in a, "realm beyond language" (1997:p29). Finally, the concept of the 'border' is proposed as a tool to reexamine culture, identity and space, and one that is particularly useful in the context of self-help groups.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-132). / ix, 132 leaves, bound 29 cm