Mental Illness: A Case Study

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Protecting Self-Esteem from Stigma: Mainstay Housing’s Strategies for Living and Coping With The Stigma of Mental Illness Beginning in the 1920’s, several social forces led to a shift in the treatment of mental illness and those living with it, the effects of which can still be seen today (Nasrallah, 2008). A push towards community-based care was believed to be the solution to the expensive and overcrowded mental institutions (Accordino, Porter, & Morse, 2001). Deinstitutionalization, led to the release of thousands of people living with serious mental illness (SMI) from asylums, into community-based outpatient clinics (Accordino, Porter, & Morse, 2001; Nasrallah, 2008). However, while the warehousing of those with SMI, in deplorable conditions, …show more content…

Limited economic, familial and knowledge resources made accessing proper care extraordinarily difficult for persons with mental illness (PWMI), leading to higher rates of poverty, homelessness, early mortality, lack of significant relationships, and social stigma, all consequences …show more content…

Mainstay Housing is a not for profit agency, which provides housing for mental health consumer-survivors (Mainstay Housing, 2014). With forty-one residential locations across Toronto, a total of 867 units, Mainstay is the leading provider of supportive housing in Ontario (Mainstay Housing, 2014). Since its establishment, Mainstay has aimed to counteract the consequences of deinstitutionalization. Mainstay has two main focuses, which they use to focus their organization’s programming and goals. The first is eviction prevention, whereby the organization employs several interventions to avoid eviction of current residents, as well as give them skills to live independently either within the organization or somewhere else if a resident decides to leave a Mainstay unit. The second and arguably the most important focus is community belonging. Mainstay regularly assesses the impact of their programming and services through the lens of community belonging. For several years now, Mainstay has conducted focus groups and distributed questionnaires to a representative sample of residents, in order to gain feedback about the perceived belonging of residents (source). However, until this year, Mainstay has not employed a large-scale survey about community belonging. The distribution of this large-scale survey was my main purpose as a volunteer for Mainstay Housing. Along with actually giving

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