Peer navigators and integrated care to address ethnic health disparities of people with serious mental illness.

People of color with serious mental illnesses experience high rates of morbidity and mortality. Patient navigators, developed for cancer care, may help this group benefit from integrated care. This review examined patient navigators' key ingredients for cancer care for relevance to patients of color for application of peer services to psychiatric goals.

SELF-STIGMA AND COMING OUT ABOUT ONE'S MENTAL ILLNESS.

Self-stigma can undermine self-esteem and self-efficacy of people with serious mental illness. Coming out may be one way of handling self-stigma and it was expected that coming out would mediate the effects of self-stigma on quality of life. This study compares coming out to other approaches of controlling self-stigma.

Self-stigma, group identification, perceived legitimacy of discrimination and mental health service use.

Stigma may interfere with mental health service use. We measured self-stigma and stigma-related cognitions (group identification and perceived legitimacy of discrimination) at baseline in 85 people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or affective disorders. After 6 months, 75 (88%) had reported use of mental health services.

A stress-coping model of mental illness stigma: I. Predictors of cognitive stress appraisal.

Stigma can be a major stressor for individuals with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. It is unclear, however, why some stigmatized individuals appraise stigma as more stressful, while others feel they can cope with the potential harm posed by public prejudice. We tested the hypothesis that the level of perceived public stigma and personal factors such as rejection sensitivity, perceived legitimacy of discrimination and ingroup perceptions (group value; group identification; entitativity, or the perception of the ingroup of people with mental illness as a coherent unit) predict the cognitive appraisal of stigma as a stressor.

International Family, Adult, and Child Enhancement Services (FACES): a community-based comprehensive services model for refugee children in resettlement.

The development of evidence-based mental health interventions for refugees is complicated by the cultural and linguistic diversity of the participants, and the need to balance treatment of past traumatic experiences with ongoing support during the process of acculturation. In an effort to gather "practice-based evidence" from existing mental health services for refugees, a collaborative study of International Family, Adult, and Child Enhancement Services (FACES), a comprehensive, community-based mental health program working with refugee children, was conducted to describe the program participants and service delivery model and to assess whether participants improved over time as a function of services. Results showed that participants improved, but that the improvement was not related to dosage of services.