Founders House of Hope is a 90-bed residential care facility providing psychosocial rehabilitation programing for consumers living with Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders and Mood Disorders.  Residents are admitted to Founders from inpatient psychiatric programs in Los Angeles and Orange County, in addition to the VA in Long Beach and Los Angeles.  

 

We are a capacity building program -- achieving this through skill acquisition groups such as illness management, self-esteem building, health and wellness, relapse prevention, resiliency building and community reintegration.  Increasing functional capacity means residents learn to manage and control their mental health condition and leading a satisfying life once discharged from Founders.

 

The services/groups provided by Dr. Levy at Founders House of Hope include the following: 

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• Supported Employment                                    * Hope and Optimism

• Assertion Training                                               * Vocational Rehabilitation

• Social Skills Training                                           * Self-Esteem Building

• Impulse Control                                                  * Building Resilience

• Relapse Prevention                                             * Illness Management

• Community Reintegration                                  * Social Problem Solving

• Creative Expression (poetry writing, art)           * Medication Education

 

The psychosocial rehabilitation program and skill building groups are designed to increase our resident's functional capacity to manage their illness, increase overall level of functioning, build self-determination and enhance quality of life.  Each resident lists their rehabilitation/recovery goals on their treatment plan and the services and supports essential to pursuing their goals are provided.  We can provide information or refer the resident to agencies for pursuing transitional housing and employment so the resident can lead a satisfying life in their community of choice. 

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The program goals include building self-empowerment, self-determination and self-sustenance. Our consumers tend to feel neglected and socially isolated making it difficult to generate a positive evaluation/self-concept. The focus of the program is identifying capabilities and interests, developing vocational skills, consumer strength and instilling optimism and hope that they can create a meaningful life and future. The services represent reservoirs of hope.  All elements of the program contribute to creating a therapeutic milieu and environment of social caring.  A unique model of self-empowerment and reinforcement for effective decision making leading to increased life satisfaction is promoted in daily programming.

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Our task at Founders is not monumental. We make investments in residents motivated to recover meaningful living -- which means we’re a restorative program.  We restore life a resident enjoyed before being diagnosed with a mental health condition. Living with conditions on the Schizophrenia Spectrum or Bipolar Disorder reduces one to a shell of who one was.  Our task is to fill the shell with what was emptied such as work, relationships, reuniting with family, an apartment, leisure and hobbies and school.  We do relatively well here -- given that the resident agrees to pursue meaningful goals aimed at restoring what the illness took away.  We restore a voice taken away from the resident -- partner with residents to provide the services, supports and resources to generate meaning and purpose. Our residents learn to ask the questions that matter the most to their life -- and when they do we’re more likely to intimately understand what matters to them the most.  We’ve got fertile soil here at Founders -- it’s my metaphor for saying once we plant you here, we’ll add water and nutrients for you to blossom.

 

Living with Schizophrenia means enduring cognitive intrusions such as auditory hallucinations, delusions and paranoia.  Our residents need to be liberated from these sensory disturbances because we derive our sense of being human from our experiences and ability to act -- to make our own decisions and pursuing goals we desire.  Doing so nurtures our sense of personhood. Psychosis -- such as delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking produces a vacuum of personal identity -- the shell we spoke of earlier.  Add powerful forces such as stigma to do battle with -- and discrimination when searching for work or an apartment; devaluation and the resident internalizing the idea that he/she is “Other” than the dominant population.  In the end -- these forces can defeat one and have the resident surrender to their condition.  We need to destigmatize mental illness by being advocates and helping remove myths that shroud Schizophrenia. Stigma has people living with mental health conditions feel irredeemably tainted -- devalued and marginalized. Our work here is to validate each resident’s fundamental personhood and support them in reconstructing a self and life.  We do real good in this area. We begin to do this with genuine empathy -- without it nothing is achieved.  Empathy is your capacity to take the role of the other --it’s asking the resident: “Tell me what it’s like to be you” Doing so conveys to the resident I am genuinely interested in trying to understand cognitively, and emotionally how you experience your condition and how it’s interrupted your life.