Programme Evaluation and Benchmarking

Abstract

Psychosocial rehabilitation (also known as psychiatric rehabilitation) is a term used to refer to a range of non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to help a person recover from severe mental illness. Severe mental illness is mental illness that is both persistent and has a major impact on life functioning. Schizophrenia is the condition most commonly associated with severe mental illness but it is misleading to associate severity with diagnosis alone. There are many cases of people diagnosed with schizophrenia where the major impact of the illness is brief or where the effect on life functioning is minor. Equally, there are many people with mood and anxiety disorders or with personality disorders whose illness has a major and persistent impact on their life functioning. This book is not concerned with the treatment of a specific diagnostic group but rather with interventions designed to assist people whose mental illness has had a major and persistent impact on life functioning, regardless of diagnosis. It is also designed as a resource and guide for students who are learning how to work effectively with this population. In particular, we see it as an especially valuable resource for the student on placement in settings that provide psychosocial rehabilitation. Some form of psychosocial rehabilitation is provided in most parts of the world. Sometimes it is provided within long-stay institutional or quasi-institutional settings but typically it is provided by community organisations, which may or may not be affiliated with clinical services. The people providing psychosocial rehabilitation may be health professionals such as nurses, occupational therapists, psychologists and social workers or they may be people without professional training but with skills and attitudes that enable them to assist such people, whether or not they have been trained as health professionals. Contemporary psychosocial rehabilitation often takes place within a recovery framework, which we endorse. The recovery framework emphasises that recovery from mental illness is a process rather than an outcome. Recovery is a personal journey that is about the rediscovery of self in the process of learning to live with an illness rather than being defined by the illness. At an individual level, it is about the development of hope and a vision for the future. At the community level, it is about supporting engagement and

Re-Presenting Christian Tradition as a Source of Inspiration and Integration for Educators in Catholic Schools—A Proposal

“…The principals we were working with were familiar with the concept of ethos in the context of the Education Act (Irish Government 1998) which governs all publicly financed schools in Ireland, including Catholic voluntary secondary schools. They were also familiar with the concept through the well-developed CEIST Charter (CEIST 2007) and the work on ethos that the CEIST has been doing with its stakeholder bodies since its foundation in 2007, for instance, the Joining the Dots programme (Meehan 2012).…”