Panelists speaking at the Sundram Fasteners Lecture Series on ‘Preventing Homelessness Among People With Serious Mental Health Problems’ emphasized the importance of shifting the focus from institutional care to providing housing for people with mental illness for better recovery and rehabilitation.
Speaking on the second day of Sunday’s lecture series, Deborah K. Padgett, Professor of Social Work, Public Health and Psychiatry at New York University, called the approach of putting the mentally ill in shelters an “approach of ladder” where he kept falling down the stairs as the dropout from the shelters was very high.
Citing his research, he said that providing permanent housing clearly showed better outcomes for people with mental illness than shelters, provided they received adequate support services. He acknowledged the challenges in implementing such an approach, particularly in the global south that was already struggling to provide affordable housing for low-income and homeless people.
Roberto Mezzina, President of the International Mental Health Collaboration Network, which worked on the development of Trieste’s progressive model for providing mental health care in Italy, shared his experience moving from institutional care to the provision of housing and care.
He attributed the success of the model primarily to a number of factors, including the availability of a network of community centers with trained professionals to provide the required care in homes where people with mental illness lived, and the ability of the government to provide housing.
He said that, in the long run, the approach proved to be profitable.
Pallavi Rohatgi, CEO of The Banyan, shared the experience of the organization’s ‘Home Again’ project which followed a similar approach to mental health care.
Noting that the organization is now in the midst of a significant scale-up of the project in several states and in Sri Lanka, he said that the current phase of the project had been largely successful.
KT Ravindran, Senior Academic Adviser at the RICS School of the Built Environment and Chairman of the INTACH Architectural Heritage Advisory Committee, highlighted the poor state of the houses given free of charge to the poor. He talked about the things that need to be taken care of architecturally when providing housing for people with mental illness.
Mrinalini Ravi, co-director of the Sundram Fasteners Center for Social Action and Research, moderated the discussion.
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