Improving the Quality of Life for Veterans with Psychosis

Finding and maintaining competitive employment is a cornerstone of the recovery of many persons with severe psychiatric illnesses. Participation in supported employment programs, in which vocational and mental health services are fully integrated in the mental health service setting, has been found to significantly increase the likelihood that persons with severe psychiatric illnesses can obtain and ployment in veterans and assisting with implementation of such programs in the VISN. Two of these studies were conducted in collaboration with Robert Drake MD, Ph.D., and Deborah Becker, M.Ed. from the Dartmouth Psychiatric Institute who developed the most empirically-validated version of supported employment, Individual Placement and Support (IPS). The first of these projects was funded by NIMH (PI: Stephen Marder, MD) and evaluated the benefits of adding a clinic-based work support intervention (the Workplace Fundamentals Module developed by Robert Liberman, MD and Charles Wallace, Ph.D.) to enhance the benefits of supported employment in persons with schizophrenia. The second of these was funded by VA Rehabilitation and Research and Development Service (PI: Shirley M. Glynn, Ph.D.) and evaluated the benefits of adding motivational interviewing to improve benefits obtained by supported employment alone. Since both of these studies are in their data analysis phase, we do not know yet if these additions improved work outcomes from supported employment alone.