Community Mental Health Center Visits and Community Mobility of People with Serious Mental Illnesses: A Facilitator or Constraint?

Mental health services and interventions have increasingly focused on the importance of community participation and mobility for people with serious mental illnesses (SMI). This study examined the role that visits to community mental health centers (CMHCs) may play in increasing community mobility of people with SMI. Eighty-nine adults with SMI receiving services at three CMHCS were tracked with GPS-enabled phones over a 13-day period. Findings revealed that participants visited more destinations on days they went to a CMHC compared to days they did not. They also spent more time out of the home and traveled greater distances. Results suggest that the benefits of visiting a mental health center appear to go beyond treatment outcomes, but also point to the possibility that obligations, whether to a clinic appointment or possibly vocational, educational, leisure, faith, or social commitments, may be an important stepping stone to more mobility and intentional, sustained community participation. © 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Citation

Greg Townley, Eugene Brusilovskiy, Louis Klein, Bryan McCormick, Gretchen Snethen, Mark S Salzer. Community Mental Health Center Visits and Community Mobility of People with Serious Mental Illnesses: A Facilitator or Constraint? Community mental health journal. 2022 Apr;58(3):420-428

Mesh Tags

PMID: 33813724

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