Thursday, January 29, 2004

Blueprint for Change: Ending Chronic Homelessness for Persons with Serious Mental Illnesses and/or Co-Occurring Substance Use Disorders
A new publication from SAMHSA - "More than a decade after the Federal Task Force on Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness called it 'unacceptable' for people with serious mental illnesses to live in unsafe and threatening conditions, more than 630,000 individuals are homeless in this country on any given night (Burt et al., 2001). About half of all adults who are homeless have substance use disorders, and many have cooccurring mental illnesses, as well. Yet, the outlook is far from bleak. Federal demonstration programs and the experience of hundreds of community-based providers offer a rich reservoir of evidence-based and promising practices." See also another new SAMHSA publication, How States Can Use SAMHSA Block Grants to Support Services for People Who Are Homeless.