My first week of my new job as Director of Development for the San Antonio Clubhouse was spent at the first clubhouse, Fountain House, in New York City. The timing was a brilliant move by my Executive Director. I had, of course, visited my clubhouse and read all there was to read about the model, but nothing can compare to living it. It felt like being thrown into a pond, not knowing how to swim, and having every hand in the water calmly reach over, not only to hold my head above water, but also, seemingly effortlessly, teaching me how to swim.
My perspective was a rather unusual one – first day in the clubhouse, first day as staff, first day in training in a place in which I would not be working—but one that I felt important to mention. The characteristic that struck me first and most dramatically was the ‘colleague equality.' This aspect of our culture is so internalized by those living within it that, after a while, it’s not amazing. It just ‘is.’
When I remarked on the fact that, after spending the day in the reception unit, I wasn’t entirely sure who were staff and who were members, my fellow trainees - who were already immersed in their clubhouses - smiled indulgently and said, something to the effect of “yes, and…?” Another colleague had to remind them I was new to the model. After only two weeks in the clubhouse, I can understand their perspective; it is now becoming mine.
Still, no matter our years (or weeks in my case) living the clubhouse model, we can benefit from reminders of how well we are fulfilling the mission. Be ready and revel in them. On the third day of FH training, a colleague, who is a member of Sky Light Center, thanked the tour guide of our employment site visit and asked how long she had been a member. Samene has been staff for four years. The member was embarrassed, but I told her it was a moment to be celebrated, another moment of “mission accomplished.” Samene just smiled.
Linda Zimmerhanzel Director of Development, San Antonio Clubhouse
The Mental Health parity and Addiction Act would ensure that large group health insurance and Medicaid plans provide coverage for mental health or substance abuse disorders on par with coverage offered for physical ailments. Implementation of the final rule would make Mental Health Parity a reality.
The Advocacy Committee of Fountain House urges you please to call or email President Obama and urge him to implement the final Mental Health Parity rule. It’s an important issue that affects people with mental illness and their loved ones. You can help to make Mental Health Parity a reality!
Dice Cooper and Alan Miller Clerical Unit and Advocacy Committee, Fountain House
I began working on my PhD in Health Psychology at Walden University in March 2009. I was under the mistaken belief that attending an online school would be easier than matriculating at a traditional brick-and-mortar campus. Walden has been the stimulating challenge of my life! I have had to write a minimum of four essays a week, and write responses to students I couldn’t see and had never met. The same goes for my professors: we can read their bios but we can’t see or meet them either.
In order to deal with this dilemma, Walden requires that students take four academic residencies over the course of their education. The residencies are either face-to-face or Walden has recently added virtual learning experiences. During residencies, students collaborate and network with other Walden students, staff (including Career Services, the librarians, and the Office for Students with Disabilities), and faculty members. At the residency, you have the opportunity to meet students from different degree programs, offering you the chance to take part in a vigorous and purposeful environment to share various perspectives and best practices.
I applied for a Summer 2012 Fountain House scholarship to help cover the cost of my textbooks for the next term and to assist me in attending my third residency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Walden’s home base, in July 2012, summer term. Students are required to take their third residency by the end of their third year. The purpose of Residency 3 is to continue developing research skills that will lead to the development of the prospectus or dissertation proposal. Topics covered during the residency include qualitative, quantitative, and mixed research designs, data collection, management, analysis considerations, and development of the prospectus. Upon completion of the residency, students will have completed a research alignment tool to inform and guide their dissertation research planning.
This residency is crucial for me to take this summer as I will be enrolled in my dissertation program fall term, 2012. In my Health Psychology program, I have been learning about the Mind-Body connection in healing and as a licensed psychiatric social worker, I found that I was beginning to incorporate holistic healing techniques with my traditional treatment modalities. I just submitted a PASS Plan to Social Security to open a healing center called Creative Healing Consultations, LLC. Each word of the company means something: “Creative” because I use the creative arts, particularly spiritual journaling and collage work, for healing; “Healing” because that is my goal, to help my clients heal mentally, physically, and spiritually; and “Consultations” because the client will work with me, not be dictated to by me, about their healing and treatments.
My work at Walden University while in my PhD program has prepared me for this move. I’m also in the process of submitting papers I have written for my classes to peer-reviewed journals to start building a publication history in my field. This Fountain House scholarship comes at a pivotal time in my educational pursuits. Attending Residency 3 will help me hone my prospectus and dissertation topic and prepare me for the work I will begin this fall. As I have also recently become an ordained minister, in receiving this scholarship I am reminded of “Ask, and it will be given unto you, knock and the door will be opened.” I am constantly reminded that we can never take Fountain House for granted, but she is always there when we need her. Thanks to the scholarship committee for helping make my vision closer to reality.
Davida Adedjouma, LMSW Education Unit and Board of Directors, Fountain House
“Interventions that emphasize the enhancement of people’s strengths and assets, in addition to and at times, instead of the amelioration of their weaknesses and deficiencies are secure in the belief that strengthening the strengths will weaken the weakness.”
John Beard and the other Fountain House program designers were aware of the pathological aspects of serious mental illness but chose to focus on the healthy behaviors and personal strengths that people with this illness exhibited. They knew that the experience of mental illness could, to some extent, affect people's motivation, cognitive functioning and/or affective expression, such that some of their skills and abilities and feelings of self-confidence and self-efficacy could be negatively impacted. Life offers us positive and negative experiences, and while both have a formative effect on personality and behavior, positive experiences also have a curative effect. They believed that the impact of positive experiences, because of their rarity, would be greater on those most damaged.
Before coming to Fountain House, many members experienced the devastating effects of stigma and a life in which their illness was the primary definition of who they were as human beings. In addition to loss of focus on their abilities, for some, this erroneous self-perception created self-deprecation and low self-efficacy and self-esteem. The Fountain House community, with its focus on the strengths of members, serves as a de-stigmatization training ground. When this focus on strength is combined with our emphasis on empowerment and the need for members to help in the operation of the community, mutual respect and collegial relationships between all participants can develop. It’s this strength-based focus that facilitates the impressive treatment results and creates the positive emotional tone experienced by most participants and visitors.
Therefore the Fountain House approach seeks to treat mental illness 1) by focusing on the strengths of a person and presenting that person with many opportunities to have real and positive experiences, while 2) limiting the negative self-evaluations that result from the negative experiences more common in the general community, like stigma and paternalism. Many people with serious mental illness need the time and a place to have these curative successful experiences in order to move ahead in their lives with confidence. With a sufficient number and type of these positive experiences, the person or ego or self becomes stronger, and maybe the illness process becomes weaker, while the person’s positive life space and quality increases in dimension.
Julius Lanoil Education and Wellness Consultant, Fountain House
In the summer 2012 semester of my college calendar, I will be taking a study abroad trip to Chengdu, China. I will be going from June 10 to July 9. On my trip, I will earn 15 credits towards my college degree; it will be funded through both financial aid and a Fountain House scholarship. Chengdu is located in the southwestern region of China, in Sichuan province. It is considered one of the less culturally sophisticated regions of China. I read an article about a man who studied at Sichuan University and then visited Beijing and ate in a chic restaurant. When he placed his order with the waitress, the waitress looked shrewdly at him and asked him where he learned to speak Mandarin. When he told her, “Chengdu,” she nodded knowingly and walked away. “I didn’t realize until later,” he said, “that it had been as if I had spoken to a New Yorker in Appalachian English.”
However, I am eager to visit Chengdu. Despite its provinciality, Chengdu was named the second biggest culinary capital of the world by the Institute of Culinary Education. Sichuanese cuisine uses 20 different cooking techniques and is replete with flavor combinations that challenge the tastebuds. There are many different types of street food, such as “tea eggs” - hard-boiled eggs soaked in black tea - that are alien to Western palates. Chengdu has a much-revered teahouse culture that encourages leisurely repose for hours over a cup of tea in a relaxed and open environment, not unlike the coffeehouses of yore in Paris and London. And, of course, the culture itself will undoubtedly manifest differences in a way that creates intellectual and psychological interest.
My trip will be jam-packed with exciting events. I will spend three weeks in Chengdu and one week in Beijing. In Chengdu, I will visit a panda reserve to see the endangered animals, see the Dujiangyen irrigation works, visit the Leshan Buddha (the largest carved stone Buddha in the world), and visit a real functional Buddhist temple. However, my most anticipated event in Chengdu is a visit to Mount Emei, one of the most sacred Chinese sites in Buddhism. The lore is that an emperor sent an emissary to India to retrieve ancient Buddhist texts. When he returned, he was requested to set up a temple on Mount Emei, and the temple became one of the most sacred in the country. Our group will spend the night on Mount Emei to watch the sun come up. As a woman who was born into the Buddhist religion and whose father was a Buddhist religious leader, this is a sacred experience for me.
In Beijing, I will have a traditional Peking duck dinner, see a traditional Chinese opera, visit the Great Wall, and see the Temple of Heaven. I am so looking forward to my trip. It will be the experience of a lifetime, and I cannot wait to go.
The goal of side by side practice at Fountain House is mastery and increased self-efficacy. In order to achieve this goal the work of the Fountain House community must be needed, and the members involved must have a positive and successful experience.
Transitional Employment is a program developed by the Fountain House working community to give members the opportunity to experience success on a job in the general community. In the Transitional Employment program, the job is real, the employer is real, the pay is real, and the requirements for successful participation are real. Each Transitional Employment placement has six month duration and usually has a four hour a day requirement. Although these jobs are guaranteed for use by the working community, each member applicant must go through an abbreviated interview process.
The need for member’s successful participation in Transitional Employment is dramatically apparent. When first approached, the prospective employer is asked to give the Fountain House working community a job that can be learned in a relatively short period of time. The community guarantees it will be competently covered, year round; staff are prepared to protect the working community’s ownership of the job, if need be, by doing the job themselves. Clearly, this creates a need in the working community for members able and willing to take on these work placements.
When members take on a job placement they are usually aware that they represent the Fountain House working community, that their performance will protect the job for use by other members, and that this job - in which they learn the generic qualities of a work place - is a step in their own personal growth. The theme of simultaneously doing for others and for oneself is played out as a value and practice in all working community activities and projects. This practice value has treatment implications as a motivator of behavior, because for some, doing for others can be easier than doing for themselves.
The second requirement of side by side practice is that the member experience success in the work. Staff workers are the first to learn the work and the employers’ requirements, so they are able to employ most of the side by side practice process while training members on the job. They can correct fearful thoughts, give reasons for the work, clarify goals, utilize other members who have previously mastered the job, give honest and supportive feedback, and generalize the specific skills inherent in the job to other work or situations. After mastery has been achieved and self efficacy has been increased, the worker and the member can discuss the next progressive step.
Julius Lanoil Education and Wellness Consultant, Fountain House
Being at Fountain House I’ve experienced a general acceptance of who I am and where I’m at in life - whether that’s confident and participating or paranoid and hatching an escape plan from under a table. The relationships I’ve created while here have gotten me through and gotten me help when I’ve been at my worst. I can sometimes forget when I am surrounded by the clubhouse community that the rest of the world isn’t always as understanding and knowledgeable about mental illness. In recent months I’ve been lucky enough to feel well for the first time in my life. It’s important for me during this time to communicate my experience to others, in hope of fostering a greater understanding of both mental illness and wellness.
Last month Fountain House was contacted by the Neuroscience Society at Columbia University to be a part of two events during a week dedicated to Mental Health Awareness. The week was in response to a student who was lost to suicide earlier this year. This very much brought issues regarding mental wellness on campus to the forefront.
One evening at the end of March, Andrea, a staff member, accompanied me and two fellow members to Columbia. There we spent the night telling our stories and answering questions about ways to eradicate stigma. Later that week Elliott, one of our unit leaders, sat on a panel of mental health professionals to answer questions about various treatment methods. Among psychiatrists, researchers and a psycho-analyst, Elliott was able to speak about using people’s strengths as a way of recovery.
The feedback that we got was positive. We were told that our personal experiences inspired and gave strength and that Elliott provided a unique non-clinical viewpoint that none of the other panelists could have. The evening meant a lot to me in terms of my own journey and moving forward. It also meant creating a chance for one more person in the world to be an ally in the future. In my life, the more times I speak of my experiences as a person with Bipolar Disorder, the less room there is to be judged, misunderstood, or treated in a way that either minimizes or dramatizes mental illness.
Mental Health Awareness Month began in 1949 to raise awareness of mental health conditions and mental wellness for all. The year, 
In the summer 2012 semester of my college calendar, I will be taking a study abroad trip to Chengdu, China. I will be going from June 10 to July 9. On my trip, I will earn 15 credits towards my college degree; it will be funded through both financial aid and a Fountain House scholarship. Chengdu is located in the southwestern region of China, in Sichuan province. It is considered one of the less culturally sophisticated regions of China. I read an article about a man who studied at Sichuan University and then visited Beijing and ate in a chic restaurant. When he placed his order with the waitress, the waitress looked shrewdly at him and asked him where he learned to speak Mandarin. When he told her, “Chengdu,” she nodded knowingly and walked away. “I didn’t realize until later,” he said, “that it had been as if I had spoken to a New Yorker in Appalachian English.”
The goal of 
