Program Overview


Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is a clinical home/case management program designed to provide comprehensive psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation, and recovery support in a community setting to persons with serious and persistent mental illness. It is an alternative to psychiatric inpatient hospitalization for individuals who experience mental illnesses that produce distress in adult functioning.

The ACT Team is available to provide treatment and rehabilitation and support activities a minimum of 12 hours a day on weekdays and 8 hours a day on weekends and holidays.

Goals

The goals of the Assertive Community Treatment program are:

  • to promote sustained psychiatric recovery
  • to reduce barriers and obstacles to achieving recovery
  • to insure that services enhance members’ goals and are provided in a supportive community environment
  • to insure that members have responsible, self-determined personal and vocational goals
  • to assist members in understanding mental illness
  • to help members develop the coping skills needed to deal with illness-related issues
  • to help members recognize and manage symptoms

Our Commitment

The roles of professional mental health staff have changed considerably with the advent of psychiatric rehabilitation and community-based interventions and supports. The clinic and counselor’s office have given way to natural community service settings, and the focus on maintenance and stabilization has given way to recovery and rehabilitation. Increasingly, rehabilitation specialists must be in touch with the wishes of their consumers.

To that end, we are committed to helping our clients experience:

  • increased community tenure by minimizing the number and length of hospitalizations
  • increased independence and subjective quality of life by acquiring and maintaining permanent housing, developing money management skills, ensuring medication compliance, and reducing symptomology
  • increased participation in meaningful activity by completed referrals to the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation and assistance with job placements
  • increased number of days of abstinence by encouraging attendance at AA meetings, assisting with drug/alcohol related legal issues, and self-report of abstinence
  • increased meaningful social relationships
  • understanding and participation in psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery principles
  • satisfaction with their treatment
  • appropriate discharge planning that includes consumer’s expectations