Patricia B Nemec

BACKGROUND: Many individuals with psychiatric disabilities face workplace challenges that motivate them to pursue self-employment, but accessible self-employment support is lacking. Using participatory action research, Reclaiming EmploymentTM (RE), an online interactive platform that provides self-employment education for people who experience ment...

As rates of substance use and mental disorders continue to rise, individuals with mental health and substance use challenges and their supporters could benefit from practical, accessible, cost-effective, wellness-focused tools outlining simple daily strategies to promote long-term recovery. The current article describes such a tool, the Journey to...

The need for behavioral health care prevention, treatment, and recovery supports, including crisis alternatives, has grown and is now receiving federal support through enhanced funding. When a person experiences severe emotional distress, crisis alternatives are a viable option instead of inpatient hospitalization to address the distress and restor...

Objective: Little is known about the employment experiences of people with preexisting behavioral health conditions during the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, despite the recognized importance of work for this group. Method: Two hundred and seventy two adults with behavioral health conditions, recruited through statewide mental hea...

People with behavioral health disorders may be particularly vulnerable to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet little is known about how they are faring. A mixed-methods, anonymous needs assessment was conducted to understand changes in the lives of adults with mental health and substance use disorders since the pandemic onset. A cross-sectiona...

Caregivers are a source of support for family members with disabilities. However, caregivers are at risk for caregiver burden, which can erode self-care skills and lead to poor physical and mental health outcomes. Caregiver Wellness Self-Care, developed to address that risk, is a 5-week group program in which participants learn about strategies tha...

Individuals served by behavioral health programs experience risk factors that threaten health and longevity. Health behavior changes may be supported through environmental modifications known as nudges. The current review (a) examines the potential value of nudges for helping individuals receiving services from behavioral health programs, and (b) o...

Family members and health care professionals for people with a variety of health conditions play a crucial role in health care. Burden for both groups can erode their self-care skills, leading to poor physical and mental health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented events that unfolded during 2020 added an additional layer of stress...

Many people with serious mental illnesses live in poverty, which can worsen mental and overall health. The authors suggest strategies to improve health outcomes through behavioral health services and supports that directly target financial wellness while reducing dependence on public benefits. Although some services focus on financial education, th...

Developed in collaboration with WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, this study (conducted in India, the UK, and the USA) integrated feedback from mental health service users into the development of the chapter on mental, behavioural, and neurodevelopmental disorders for ICD-11. The ICD-11 will be used for health reporting from Janu...

Self-employment is an alternative to wage employment and an opportunity to increase labor force participation by people with psychiatric disabilities. Self-employment refers to individuals who work for themselves, either as an unincorporated sole proprietor or through ownership of a business. Advantages of self-employment for people with psychiatri...

Topic: Funding for behavioral health service provider agencies is always limited, making it difficult to decide how and when to spend scarce resources on staff training. If evidence existed for a clear return on investment for certain training topics or techniques, agency administrators may find it easier to make the decisions about how much and w...

Topic: Training evaluations may encompass different dimensions, from engagement of learners to the achievement of specific and meaningful learning objectives to the ultimate goal of changing what the learners do after completing the training. Yet, most behavioral health agencies fail to evaluate training at all, or limit their evaluations to simpl...

Individuals with major mental disorders could benefit from low cost, functional ways to support healthy lifestyles. Walking is a popular, preferred, accessible, and safe physical activity for many people. Walking is free, requiring no specialized equipment or membership fee, and is important to support engagement in other daily living activities. T...

Topic: This column provides an overview of methods for training to improve service provider active listening and reflective responding skills. Purpose: Basic skills in active listening and reflective responding allow service providers to gather information about and explore the needs, desires, concerns, and preference of people using their servi...

Topic: This column describes challenges for hiring, training, and supervising psychiatric rehabilitation service providers for positions that involve the use of digital health technology. Purpose: Adoption and implementation of any new technology or technique requires workforce development. This article outlines considerations for policymakers,...

Topic: As behavioral health care policies evolve, based on shifting paradigms and a developing base of evidence, day-to-day practices at the direct service level must change. Workforce development initiatives are a critical component to effect such change yet may be overlooked, underfunded, or implemented in ways that are ineffective. Purpose: T...

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 40(2) of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal (see record 2017-17420-001 ). The article was mislabeled as Editorial and should be a Comment. The Response to Letter to the Editor section should be a Reply and now has its own http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ h0101580.] Replies to comments by...

Topic: This column describes strategies for helping educators and trainers address common problems with executive functioning and memory for their audiences, to better facilitate learning. Purpose: The purpose of the article is to suggest strategies for maximizing learning and goal achievement for students in academic settings, as well as for bu...

Topic: This article raises questions regarding defining the role of peer specialists and related employment practices. Purpose: The questions raised may be used to guide future research. Sources used: Areas needing further investigation were identified through personal and professional experience, discussions with colleagues, and a review of p...

Abstract Psychiatric rehabilitation is recognized as a field with specialized knowledge and skills required for practice. The Certified Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner (CPRP) credential, an exam-based certification process, is based on a regularly updated job task analysis that, in its most recent iteration, identified the new core competen...

Regardless of an individual's mental health status, habits are difficult to establish and/or eliminate. Given the importance of good habits to overall health and wellness, nurses and other mental health service providers need to understand the force of habits (positive and negative), factors that make habit change difficult, and approaches that are...

This column describes the experience of prejudice and discrimination that some mental health service users encounter in their interactions with service providers and organizations. The intent of this column is to highlight potential action steps to address the negative beliefs and attitudes of service providers that contribute to prejudice and disc...

People who are served by the public mental health system often live with chronic medical conditions, exhibit many risk factors for metabolic syndrome, and experience high rates of early mortality. This research project assessed the recency of screenings and perceptions of overall health of 148 people served by the public mental health system and at...

This column describes the key components of a learning collaborative, with examples from the experience of 1 organization. A learning collaborative is a method for management, learning, and improvement of products or processes, and is a useful approach to implementation of a new service design or approach. This description draws from published mate...

This column describes the key components of a community of practice, with examples from the experience of 1 such group. A community of practice is a potentially useful model for developing and disseminating knowledge about psychiatric rehabilitation and to supplement the short-term training sessions that typically constitute psychiatric rehabilitat...

Recovery-oriented service systems explicitly value including people with lived experiences of a mental and substance use diagnosis in the design, delivery, and evaluation of those services. Including first-person accounts as part of the education and training of service providers "demonstrates" recovery is possible, promotes empathy, offers insight...

Topic: This article suggests a positive psychology framework to strengthen and broaden psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery thought and practice. Purpose: We inform about positive psychology concepts and measures that can be used to further knowledge, enhance practice, and guide research. Sources used: Foundational concepts are drawn from t...

In the education and training realm of psychiatric rehabilitation, this article uses a composting/crop-dusting metaphor to describe a competency-based framework of staff development. The crop-dusting, or "fly over," approach to training is likened to an aerial dump of information that may have some positive effect on growth if it's done at the righ...

PowerPoint (PPT) offers many advantages over the older technologies and has the potential to offer advantages over using no technology at all. I will go over several misuses of PPT, with each followed by suggestions for using the technology more effectively. The column ends with some resource recommendations. Each training session or training serie...

The whole point of teaching and training is to have the learners leave in some way different from how they came in-more skilled, more knowledgeable, more self-aware. Transformative learning refers to dramatic change, where the learner achieves a shift in perspective. This shift results from a critical examination of one's own assumptions, values, a...

Behind every successful training program is a key message. A simple and straightforward message provides guidance and boundaries for detailing training content and developing a curriculum or lesson outline. Consistency across the agency's guiding policy and procedure documents lays the groundwork for coordination and collaboration throughout the or...

Reviews the book, The Heart and Soul of Change: Delivering What Works in Therapy (2nd Ed.) edited by Barry L. Duncan et al. (see record 2009-10638-000). The premise behind the approach this book describes is that service providers need to track how people using their services are experiencing them-whether the service user feels helped and how the s...

This article focuses on training program designed to provide knowledge and skills to practitioners providing Department of Mental Health-funded services for transition age youth, the curriculum for the training applied a recovery-oriented and strengths-based philosophy to help young people with emotional and behavioral difficulties make a successfu...

Although not strictly "education and training," promoting staff wellness is an important component in hiring, supervising, and evaluating psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners. Certainly, a "well" staff member is likely to have reduced absenteeism, but also is likely to be a more efficient worker and a more effective learner. Given the emphasis...

Reviews the book, Teaching mental health by Theo Stickley and Thurstine Basset (see record 2007-01629-000). The focus on active involvement of people who use mental health services make this book valuable for psychiatric rehabilitation trainers as well as for educators and policy makers in the more generic behavioral health field. (PsycINFO Databas...

Reviews the book, Psychotherapy relationships that work: Therapist contributions and responsiveness to patients by J. C. Norcross (see record 2003-02805-000 ). Norcross has compiled a library's worth of information summarized by a panel of experts on psychotherapy outcomes. The book is organized into chapters that summarize the research supporting...

The primary focus of this article is on the trainees: how they are selected, and techniques for preparation and follow-up to enhance learning and application. Experienced trainers and educators know the various types of people who attend training sessions, yet may not have a clear set of categories with which to describe them. Trainers can enhance...

As the largest advocacy organization representing consumers and family caregivers, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has been a leader in creating educational programs and training family members and consumers to teach them, at no charge, in communities across the country. In fact, NAMI is now the largest purveyor of these educational...

The resource described here, Mental Health Ministries, makes use of public education and inservice education to spread the word about the importance of recovery and to focus on the area of spirituality, which is too often neglected within mental health services. In 2001, Reverend Susan Gregg-Schroeder created Mental Health Ministries with the speci...

When subscribers receive this issue of the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, presenters will be learning whether their workshop proposals have been accepted. Therefore, the topic of conference presentations seems timely. Based on the review of recent workshop proposals, one common error is making the proposal title so long that it looks like an a...

The author describes the process of training individuals who are working in psychiatric rehabilitation programs. Based on extensive experience, the author believes that any in-service program designed to create change needs to follow a train-practice-train format, where trainees are asked to apply their new learning for a short period, then return...

The most basic principle in providing training in cultural competence is to recognize the lifelong nature of the quest or journey required to learn about and understand the many diverse cultures that exist. "Culture" encompasses many things and the concept of "diversity" needs to generate the multiple ways that identity is formed. Cultural competen...

Most educators and trainers in psychiatric rehabilitation are now familiar with the push to implement evidence based practices. Parallel to the evidence-based practice movements in medicine and mental health care, education experts are beginning to apply research-based knowledge of how people learn to the design of education and training programs....

The purpose of the column is primarily to address issues of interest to educators and trainers in psychiatric rehabilitation, including highlighting the content and methods that seem most effective in developing the beliefs and competencies that are key to psychiatric rehabilitation practice. One common challenge is to have the broader behavioral h...

Although researchers and policy-makers now recognize that people do recover from psychiatric disabilities, direct service providers still know little about factors that influence recovery, and often lack the knowledge and skill to facilitate the recovery process. This article reviews the recent research on recovery and presents implications for pra...

In recent years there has been significant growth in academic programs that prepare students to become psychiatric rehabilitation practitioners. Educators from a number of these programs have come together to form a consortium. This group has the potential to enhance psychiatric rehabilitation education by developing curricula and fieldwork standar...

This article reviews the history of graduate education in psychiatric rehabilitation, and discusses unique aspects of teaching psychiatric rehabilitation at the graduate level. Various curriculum models are reviewed, with a discussion of similarities and differences across disciplines. Common educational objectives are summarized, and future direct...

Through personal experience, the author reestablishes the value of some principles that are basic to the practice of rehabilitation counseling. The challenges they pose for both rehabilitation consumers and providers are exemplified, and ways of truly embracing them are recommended.

Discusses direct skills (DSK) teaching in comparison to conventional skills training. While the latter is based on behavioral techniques and incorporates principles from education, the former is based on education, a "teaching as treatment" model (R. R. Carkhuff and B. G. Berenson, 1976), and incorporates principles from behavioral and social learn...

The rehabilitation literature speaks eloquently of the stages of adjustment to disability for individuals with physical disability, but discussions in the literature about adjustment to psychiatric disability are virtually non-existent. The parallels in the fields of physical and psychiatric disability, and the newly accepted emphasis on rehabilita...

Reviews the book, Supervising Counselors and Therapists: A Developmental Approach by Cal D. Stoltenberg and Ursula Delworth (1988). This book provides an a theoretical framework for assessing and describing supervisees, and offers some practice suggestions for facilitating the growth and development of new clinicians. The book is divided into ten c...

The collected articles for this special issue of Rehabilitation Education demonstrate the high level of sophistication and professionalism of psychiatric rehabilitation today and the enormous gap between psychiatric rehabilitation education and the needs of the field. Clearly, psychiatric rehabilitation is no longer in its infancy. However, in spit...