Return to Community: Building Support Systems for People with Psychiatric Disabilities

The book woke me up. It is, in many senses, a work of personal passion, and this passion, provocative, and precious is engaging. The chapter describing the consumer self-help movement could be an especially valuable tool for teaching psychiatric residents and other trainees about the consumer perspective...the volume lays out Carling's enlightened, informed, inspiring perspective, buttressed by data and practical experience. It is extremely valuable for consumers, professionals, family members, and all others whose private or public lives are touched by the disability of mental illness. --Lisa Dixon, MD, University of Maryland at Baltimore, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

Well-constructed and easy to read it is a primary resource on the consumer movement and on models of contemporary mental health service delivery. Psychologists, especially those who work with persons with major mental illnesses, will be enlightened by its empirical examples of the power of dignity and choice and its refreshingly operational approaches to solving the basic pragmatic (and therapeutic) issues of community living. --Harriet P. Lefley in Contemporary Psychology

This book is a comprehensive guide for those who seek to include people with psychiatric disabilities in the planning and implementing of services.... The book is thoroughly researched and referenced and... the ideas are clearly presented and easily applicable. --Sally Davis, the University College of Ripon and York St. John.

Paul Carling has clearly and concisely, yet comprehensively, captured in words two decades of the achievements, challenges, policy issues, controversies, and practical realities of the community support movement in this book. He has done so with attention to the human dilemmas and obstacles faced by the intended recipients of supports, persons with psychiatric disabilities, and their families. He gives us practical suggestions and applications for revamping community support programs, and he is convincing in his reminder that integration for persons with a psychiatric disability has not yet really happened, ' and that stigma is alive and well. Most importantly, he makes a strong case for the lived experience' of mental illness inextricably linked to our success in achieving community integration. --Martha B. Knisley, Formerly the Director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Deputy Secretary of Mental Health in Pennsylvania

All of us are confronted with the challenge of integrating people with mental health difficulties in our communities. In Return to Community, Paul shares with us a vision of community which is built on the principles of community integration and empowerment. He shares the experience of communities in the process of making this vision a reality, as they struggle with the critical issues of employment, housing, and social networks.

Paul courageously shares a vision which draws on a wealth of both experiential and academic knowledge learned from his own life and the lives of others. His life is a model, for all of us, of a change agent committed to developing communities which embrace persons with mental health difficulties.

The underlying message that Paul communicates is one of hope: Community integration and empowerment can be the 'lived' reality for people with mental health difficulties. Personally, we are challenged to continue to believe in and take steps toward realizing this 'shared' vision of community. In so doing, we will continue to plant 'seeds of hope' in what has in the past been deemed a 'hopeless' situation. --Susan Hardie, Hon.B.Sc., B.Ed., Coordinator of the National Network for Mental Health (Canadian network of persons with mental health difficulties)

Paul Carling is a man of passionate beliefs and boundless faith. Return to Community reflects his fundamental commitment to the principles of self-help, community integration, and empowerment for people with psychiatric disabilities. Anyone involved in the current 'quiet revolution' will value this book for its step-by-step strategies, practical examples, and tone of confidence in the future. Return to Community provides not only the road map for getting there, but the inspiration required to sustain the journey. --Bonnie Pape, M.Ed., M.E.S., Director of Programs, Canadian Mental Health Association, National Office

Return to Community is a book that will change the reader, and cause a rethinking of attitudes and assumptions about mental health treatment....This book goes beyond the common abstractions about consumer empowerment' and community integration' to make these concepts real....A wealth of examples to make his ideas come to life. The people with psychiatric disability who speak in the book are the same people whom I know from my own clinical work, but they are presented in a new light that makes me want to go out and look at my own clients somewhat differently....The author addresses the difficult issues of limited resources, living with a disability, and competing agendas from other parts of the community. The core issue, however, is the role of stigma and how it has influenced society's treatment of persons with psychiatric disability.

Primarily, however, this is not a book about problems but about hope. The author combines information from available research with a large dose of common sense--and in the end suggests new kinds of answers. It is a book about a paradigm shift--about coming up with new answers by asking very different kind of questions. It is a book that offers concrete suggestions about how we can do things differently--how services can be organized, how housing can be developed, and how true community integration can be facilitated. It is a book that suggests new ways that we as mental health professionals can work with our clients. --Ronald J. Diamond, M.D., Medical Director, Mental Health Center of Dane County and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin