Thursday, January 13, 2005

Implementing Recovery-based Care: Tangible Guidance for SMHAs  Page at the NASMHPD web site on an "e-Report" on recovery - "According to renowned researcher Courtenay Harding, Ph.D., recovery from mental illness has been researched and proven for decades, and she will cite ten studies from all over the globe as evidence (Harding, 2004). The irony is, as Harding will point out, you won’t find a section on recovery in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact, you won’t even find the word in the manual’s index. Only a small minority of graduate mental health programs features a recovery focus, and on the administrative side, the topic of recovery is often overlooked, misunderstood, or moved to the back burner in the face of competing priorities. Without any infrastructure for recovery-based mental health care, it’s no wonder that so many administrators and clinicians haven’t bought in to what is essentially a basic human right to feel better. In fact, just mentioning the word recovery seems to cause a stir depending on your training, beliefs, and role in the mental health rehabilitation system." See also the table of contents of the articles included in the report.  
  

Alliance for Taxpayer Access asks NIH who really owns publicly-funded medical research  Alliance for Taxpayer Access press release at EurekAlert - "In a letter sent Tuesday to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an informal coalition of stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public, expressed deep disappointment after NIH cancelled a planned briefing and announcement on new guidelines. No explanation was given for the cancellation of the announcement. Advocates had hoped the NIH plan would make peer-reviewed articles on taxpayer-funded research fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. In the long-awaited Enhanced Public Access Policy, NIH was expected to issue a call to action to each grant recipient to voluntarily submit her or his peer-reviewed scientific research results to PubMed Central at the National Library of Medicine. By making this wealth of federally–funded research information available to spur innovation and improve health, NIH would work through its grantees to fulfill the 'research compact' that governs every grant of public funds by the agency."