Development, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of a recovery-based curriculum for community navigation specialists working with individuals with serious mental illnesses and repeated hospitalizations.

A recovery-oriented curriculum for training the Community Navigation Specialists (CNSs) of the new Opening Doors to Recovery in Southeast Georgia program was developed, implemented, and preliminarily evaluated. This new mental health program provides mobile, community-based support services to individuals with serious mental illnesses and a history of psychiatric inpatient recidivism (and commonly past incarcerations and homelessness). Teams of CNSs include a licensed social worker, a family member of an individual with a serious mental illness, and a peer specialist with lived experience. In two courses held in February and June of 2011, 14 newly hired CNSs participated in the new training. A pre-training/post-training evaluation demonstrated statistically significant improvements in pertinent knowledge and self-efficacy for working in a community navigation role. As the recovery paradigm continues to be implemented in diverse real-world mental health treatment settings, recovery-based training curricula should be carefully constructed and evaluated.

Opening doors to recovery: a novel community navigation service for people with serious mental illnesses.

This column describes Opening Doors to Recovery in Southeast Georgia, a partnership between public agencies, a private corporation, a not-for-profit organization, and an academic institution. Teams of community navigation specialists that include a licensed mental health professional, a family member of an individual with a serious mental illness, and a peer with lived experience in recovery seek to enhance participants' community integration, support them in developing a meaningful day, ensure access to adequate treatment, and facilitate stable housing, improved relationships, and desired vocational, volunteer, or educational activities.

The use of drawing for psychological assessment in Britain: survey findings.

The current study reports previously unpublished data on drawing as an assessment tool obtained from a survey of broader assessment practices of British clinical psychologists (Bekhit, Thomas, Lalonde, & Jolley, 2002). A questionnaire was completed by 158 clinical psychologists practising in Britain concerning their use of, and views about psychological assessment and the use of drawings in such assessment. The results were compared with those of a similar survey conducted in the United States by Lubin, Larsen, Matarazzo, and Seever (1985) and Watkins, Campbell, Nieberding, and Hallmark (1995). Drawing tests are used extensively by North American clinical psychologists despite controversy over their reliability and validity. In contrast, the current survey's results indicate that British clinical psychologists hardly ever use formal drawing tests, but approximately half of them reported using drawings as an informal assessment aid. The frequent but informal use of drawing as an aid to assessment by British psychologists is consistent with their overwhelming preference for clinical interviewing as opposed to formal testing in the psychological evaluation of their clients. The more widespread use of drawing tests by American clinicians is consistent with their greater willingness than their British counterparts to include projective testing in their assessments.