Kevin Haggerty, my co-facilitator for the Heartland Consumer Network
This is a participatory action research project started by Jean Campbell, Ph.D. Dr. Campbell is a research who herself has recovered from a mental health diagnosis to become a leader in the mental health civil rights movement. Participatory action research in an interactive kind of research where the study participants can give feedback to change the project’s goals and outcome measures. This program is administered by the Heartland Consumer Network, an organization made of people in Missouri that have been labeled with psychiatric diagnoses. We are part of the Alternatives movement, or the consumer movement, a civil rights struggle to help people with mental illness. The Wellbeing for All project is a large statewide capacity building grant to strengthen Missouri’s network of people working for our civil rights issues.
My part is in this grant to help assess the mental health friendliness of my local community, in this case the entire KCMO metro area. Kevin Haggerty, my partner for the project, is helping to conduct four interviews of community members, and conduct two focus groups of people identified as having mental illnesses. So far we have interviewed a person from KCMO Parks and Recreation, someone from the KCMO Police Department, a person in vocational rehabilitation, and we are now looking for a clergy person to interview. We are doing focus groups at two peer support centers, Ark of Friends, and S.I.D.E., which stands for Socialization, Interdependence, Development, and Empowerment.
The late Al Henning, who was one of the founding board members for the Heartland Consumer Network
When our research is completed, we’ll use a scoring system to figure out how friendly Kansas City towards people who have been labeled with mental illness. This is called the C-FACIT, or Community Fidelity Assessments Common Ingredients Tool. This is a fancy dancy name devised by Dr. Campbell. The main idea is that there are certain things commonly needed to help people recover from mental illness, and we are checking to see how many of those ingredients we can find in our community sources in Kansas City.
The Wellness Common Ingredients have six categories. For example, Community Structure can check to see how well the region makes decisions to support people with psychiatric labels. It can see how responsive the governments are to citizens, and how well communities are linked to peer support. The Environment of the community can check both the physical and emotional space in the community. We look for things like how we we foster inclusiveness, promote safety, and build structures that aren’t too formal and hierarchical. We also look at Belief Systems, Peer Support, Education, and Advocacy. Here’s a link to a PDF that explains more about this program.
