From the streets to a hotel: a qualitative study of the experiences of homeless persons in the pandemic era.

In the wake of COVID-19, programs for housing homeless individuals in hotels have emerged in the U.S., though research has yielded little information about the impact of these programs on participants expressed in their own words.

"A Light at the End of the Tunnel": Experiences With Peer Specialists in the Open Dialogue Model.

Objective: The authors examined participants' experiences with peer specialists in Parachute NYC, a community mental health program of support teams trained in Open Dialogue and intentional peer support.

Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with eight enrollees and 10 network members (enrollees' family members). All excerpts coded as pertaining to peers were thematically analyzed.

A Predictive Coding Framework for Understanding Major Depression.

Predictive coding models of brain processing propose that top-down cortical signals promote efficient neural signaling by carrying predictions about incoming sensory information. These "priors" serve to constrain bottom-up signal propagation where prediction errors are carried via feedforward mechanisms. Depression, traditionally viewed as a disorder characterized by negative cognitive biases, is associated with disrupted reward prediction error encoding and signaling.

Experiences of Parachute NYC: An Integration of Open Dialogue and Intentional Peer Support.

Guided by the principles of Open Dialogue and Intentional Peer Support (IPS), Parachute NYC was designed to provide a "soft landing" for people experiencing psychiatric crisis. From 2012 to 2018, Parachute's teams of clinicians and peer specialists provided home-based mental health care to enrollees and their networks (family, friends), seeking to engage and improve their natural support networks. This qualitative study examined the experiences of enrollees and network members who participated in Parachute.

"If you're gonna help me, help me": Barriers to housing among unsheltered homeless adults.

Despite a legally-mandated right to shelter and extensive outreach efforts, an estimated 3,675 homeless individuals were living on the streets of New York City in 2018. Through interviews with 43 unsheltered homeless individuals in the borough of Manhattan (age range 21-74 years), this qualitative study examined barriers they face in accessing housing and other services as well as experiences surviving on the street. Through thematic analysis of the interview data, the most common barriers found were obtaining required identification documents, lack of accessibility of shelters amid complex healthcare needs, waiting as part of the process, and exclusion of pets from shelters and housing options.