Home 11 : Preparing Chronic Mental Patients for On-Campus Living

One of the major challenges the public mental health system faces today is the development of an adequate continuum of supportive residences for chronic mentally ill patients. The relatively large step from inpatient ward to traditional community residence represents a crucial gap in this continuum. One New York State facility, South Beach Psychiatric Center (3,4), has narrowed the gap with a series of on-campus residences that provide almost as much structure as open inpatient wards. Home 11, the training site for a developing campus residence system at Rockland Psychiatric Center, closes this gap from the inpatient side, providing a protected inpatient environment that offers almost as much freedom as a community residence.

On-campus residences provide the potential for more effective discharge planning for chronic mental patients. Patients can move back into the community in an orderly manner with the on-campus housing available as backup. For more fragile or difficult patients, long-term supportive residences on hospital campuses offer a potentially better quality of life than struggling in often-hostile communities.