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Biomedical subjects

P W Corrigan

Publications and source records attributed to P W Corrigan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Performance improvement teams for better psychiatric rehabilitation.

Despite the promise of psychiatric rehabilitation, many programs fail to incorporate innovative rehabilitation practices into their day-to-day regimens. Performance improvement is an effective paradigm for helping agencies improve the quality of their programs. Four phases of performance improvement are reviewed in this article: organizing for change, preparing the environment, focusing the environment, and maintaining improvement. Implementing the four phases of performance improvement is illustrated in a case study. Methodological rigor of data generated by performance improvement teams is also discussed.

Humans↗

Mental health team leadership and consumers satisfaction and quality of life.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine the association between leadership styles of leaders of mental health treatment teams and consumers' ratings of satisfaction with the program and their quality of life. METHODS: A multifactor model has distinguished three factors relevant to leadership of mental health teams: transformational leadership, in which a leader's primary goal is to lead the team to evolving better programs; transactional leadership, in which the leader strives to maintain effective programs through feedback and reinforcement; and laissez-faire leadership, an ineffective, hands-off leadership style. Research has shown transformational leadership to be positively associated with measures of the team's functioning, but the effects of leadership style on consumers is not well known. A total of 143 leaders and 473 subordinates from 31 clinical teams rated the leadership style of the team leader. In addition, 184 consumers served by these teams rated their satisfaction with the treatment program and their quality of life. RESULTS: Consumers' satisfaction and quality of life were inversely associated with laissez-faire approaches to leadership and positively associated with both transformational and transactional leadership. Moreover, leaders' and subordinates' ratings of team leadership accounted for independent variance in satisfaction ratings-up to 40 percent of the total variance. CONCLUSIONS: Leadership seems to be an important variable for understanding a team's impact on its consumers.

Adult↗

The construct validity of empowerment among consumers of mental health services.

Subscales of the Empowerment Scale (Rogers, E. S., Chamberlin, J., Ellison, M. L., Crean, T., 1997. A consumer-constructed scale to measure empowerment among users of mental health services. Psychiatr. Serv. 48, 1042-1047) were examined to see whether they fit a model of consumer empowerment that distinguishes self- and community orientations. In addition, the relationship of these two superordinate factors to several psychosocial factors was examined. Thirty-five participants in a partial hospitalization program were administered the Empowerment Scale and measures of quality of life, social support, self-esteem, psychiatric symptoms, needs and resources, global functioning, and verbal intelligence. Analysis of the subscales of the Empowerment Scale yielded two factors consistent with self- and community orientations to empowerment. Correlational analyses revealed that the two superordinate factors were associated with different sets of psychosocial variables. A self-orientation to empowerment was significantly associated with quality of life, social support, self-esteem, and psychiatric symptoms. Community orientation was correlated with self-esteem, resources, verbal intelligence, and ethnicity. The implications of these findings for a model of consumer empowerment are discussed.

Adult↗

Recovery as a psychological construct.

Mental health advocates have proposed recovery as a vision for severe mental illness. The purpose of this study is to examine psychometric characteristics of a measure of the psychological construct. Thirty-five participants in a partial hospitalization program were administered the Recovery Scale and measures of quality of life, social support, self-esteem, consumer empowerment, psychiatric symptoms, needs and resources, global functioning, and verbal intelligence. Results showed the scale to have satisfactory test-retest reliability and internal consistency. Analysis of the concurrent validity of the Recovery Scale showed recovery to be positively associated with self-esteem, empowerment, social support, and quality of life. It was inversely associated with psychiatric symptoms and age. Implications of these findings for a psychological model of recovery are discussed.

Adult↗

Transformational and transactional leadership skills for mental health teams.

Many treatments for persons with severe mental illness are provided by mental health teams. Team members work better when led by effective leaders. Research conducted by organizational psychologists, and validated on mental health teams, have identified a variety of skills that are useful for these leaders. Bass (1990, 1997) identified two sets of especially important skills related to transformational and transactional leadership. Leaders using transformational skills help team members to view their work from more elevated perspectives and develop innovative ways to deal with work-related problems. Skills related to transformational leadership promote inspiration, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration, participative decision making, and elective delegation. Mental health and rehabilitation teams must not only develop creative and innovative programs, they must maintain them over time as a series of leader-team member transactions. Transactional leadership skills include goal-setting, feedback, and reinforcement strategies which help team members maintain effective programs.

Decision Making↗

Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma.

Advocacy, government, and public-service groups rely on a variety of strategies to diminish the impact of stigma on persons with severe mental illness. These strategies include protest, education, and promoting contact between the general public and persons with these disorders. The authors argue that social psychological research on ethnic minority and other group stereotypes should be considered when implementing these strategies. Such research indicates that (a) attempts to suppress stereotypes through protest can result in a rebound effect; (b) education programs may be limited because many stereotypes are resilient to change; and (c) contact is enhanced by a variety of factors, including equal status, cooperative interaction, and institutional support. Future directions for research and practice to reduce stigma toward persons with severe mental illness are discussed.

Health Education↗

Changing attitudes about schizophrenia.

Research on the effectiveness of short-term education programs in changing societal attitudes about mental illness has been mixed. Education efforts seem to be mediated by characteristics of the program participants. This study determines whether the effects of a specially prepared, semester-long course on severe mental illness are mediated by pre-education knowledge about and contact with severe mental illness. Eighty-three participants who were enrolled in either a course on severe mental illness or general psychology completed the Opinions about Mental Illness Questionnaire before beginning the course and at completion. Research participants also completed a pre-and posttest of knowledge about mental illness and a pretest on their contact with people who have severe mental illness. The education program had positive effects on some attitudes about mental illness. Interestingly, the effects of education group interacted with pre-education knowledge and contact and varied depending on attitude. Participants with more pre-education knowledge and contact were less likely to endorse benevolence attitudes after completing the education program. Participants with more intimate contact showed less improvement in attitudes about social restrictiveness. Implications of these augmentation and ceiling effects are discussed.

Adult↗

Social perception and social skill in schizophrenia.

The relationship of social perception to social skill in schizophrenia was investigated. Twenty-six outpatients completed three social perception tasks (i.e. facial affect recognition, social cue recognition, and self-ratings of social skill) and participated in two role-plays. Correlational analyses revealed that the self-ratings of social skill had the most consistent relationship with social skill among the social perception measures, even after controlling for symptomatology and subject demographics. Other measures of social perception (i.e. social cue recognition) had weaker relationships with social skills. Implications for future research and psychosocial interventions are discussed.

Adult↗

Factors that affect social cue recognition in schizophrenia.

Earlier research (Corrigan and Green, Am. J. Psychiatry, 150 (1993) 589-594) showed fairly symptomatic persons with schizophrenia give more false-positive responses when answering questions about abstract cues in a social situation (i.e. affect, rules, and goals inferred about an interpersonal situation) than concrete cues (i.e. actions and dialogue observed in a situation). It is unclear, however, whether differential cue recognition is due to schizophrenia per se, or some aspect of the illness commensurate with significant symptoms and in-patient care. Moreover, the abstract and concrete dimension in the earlier study had not been independently validated. In this study, the 288 items of the Social Cue Recognition Test (SCRT) were divided into three sets based on abstraction ratings provided by 38 college students. The SCRT was then completed by 48 participants with DSM-III-R diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Participants with schizophrenia were divided into low and high symptom groups using scores from the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale. Results showed both low symptom and high symptom groups exhibited a differential deficit in cue recognition. False positives were greater for items rated as more abstract. Implications for understanding the social cognitive deficits of persons with schizophrenia are discussed.

Adult↗

Results of a job analysis of psychologists working in state hospitals.

The graduate training of psychologists should prepare them for central roles in state hospitals, especially roles involving direct patient care and supervision of colleagues. To what extent do actual job practices match graduate preparation? To find out, 55 psychologists from 12 state hospitals in the Midwest were surveyed regarding their educational backgrounds and time currently spent in various job activities. Results indicated that paperwork consumes more time than any other activity, followed by therapeutic services, psychological assessment, supervision, and case management. Almost 50% of the sample was trained under a cognitive-behavioral orientation; however, more than 60% of survey participants now practice according to eclectic models. These results imply that psychologists in these settings may not be utilized to their full potential because of a variety of organizational constraints.

Administrative Personnel↗

Developing effective team leaders.

For most staff, the most challenging leadership role they will play is their first. This chapter describes a research-based training program being developed to help these leaders increase their effectiveness in this first role.

Chicago↗

What mental health teams want in their leaders.

The authors present the findings of the first phase of a 3-year study developing a skills training curriculum for mental health team leaders. A factor model empirically generated from clinical team members was compared to Bass' (1990) Multifactor Model of Leadership. Members of mental health teams generated individual responses to questions about effective leaders. Results from this survey were subsequently administered to a sample of mental health team members. Analysis of these data yielded six factors: Autocratic Leadership, Clear Roles and Goals, Reluctant Leadership, Vision, Diversity Issues, and Supervision. Additional analyses suggest Bass' Multifactor Model offers a useful paradigm for developing a curriculum specific to the needs of mental health team leaders.

Adult↗

Building teams and programs for effective rehabilitation.

Carefully controlled, clinical research has shown psychiatric rehabilitation to significantly help persons with severe mental illness address their disabilities and obtain a higher quality of life. For psychiatric rehabilitation to yield its greatest effect, discrete principles and skills that are part of the rehabilitation paradigm must be disseminated to staff working in real-world settings. Staff training strategies that help the rehabilitation team develop effective programs are especially important. This paper reviews Interactive Staff Training (IST), an approach to team building and program development that combines educational and organizational strategies. IST comprises four stages--introduction to the system, program development, program implementation, and program maintenance--with each stage defined by behavioral tasks that engage the team and corresponding products that serve as markers of progress. Testing treatment dissemination strategies poses interesting problems for the researcher, some which are reviewed here. Outcome studies completed on IST are summarized in light of these problems. The paper ends with a consideration of some future directions for research in this area.

Humans↗