Client Outreach in Los Angeles County's Assisted Outpatient Treatment Program: Strategies and Barriers to Engagement.

Purpose: Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) programs can compel treatment-refusing individuals to participate in mental health treatment via civil court order. In California's AOT programs, individuals first must be offered 30 days of outreach services and can accept services voluntarily. This study examines the use of outreach strategies in an AOT program with the potential for voluntary or involuntary enrollment.

Mental Health Conservatorship Among Homeless People With Serious Mental Illness.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine associations between homelessness and length of psychiatric hospitalization and to explore the role of mental health conservatorship in determining discharge location for patients who are homeless and have a grave disability from serious mental illness.

Methods: This observational study used administrative data from a safety-net psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles. The sample included 795 adults (≥18 years) who were hospitalized on an involuntary psychiatric hold between 2016 and 2018.

Recovery in Context: Thirty Years of Mental Health Policy in California.

Over the past quarter century, Recovery has become the hegemonic model guiding mental health policy. Advocates presented Recovery as a radical departure from the past, with the promise of dramatically improved outcomes for those with serious mental illness. This article looks at the implementation of Recovery-based policies in California from the 1990s to the present and interrogates the ways these policies emerged out of and reinforced many of the problems they were intended to solve.

The Community and Patient Partnered Research Network (CPPRN): Application of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research to Promote Behavioral Health Equity.

Objective: We describe the rationale, development, and progress on the Community and Patient Partnered Research Network (CPPRN). The CPPRN builds on more than a decade of partnered work and is designed to promote health equity by developing partnered research on behavioral health and social risk factors in Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Setting: A community-academic partnership across Los Angeles County and New Orleans.

System Transformation Under the California Mental Health Services Act: Implementation of Full-Service Partnerships in L.A. County.

Objective: The study evaluated the effect of California's Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) on the structure, volume, location, and patient centeredness of Los Angeles County public mental health services.

Methods: This prospective mixed-methods study (2006-2013) was based in five Los Angeles County public mental health clinics, all with usual care and three with full-service partnerships (FSPs). FSPs are MHSA-funded programs designed to "do whatever it takes" to provide intensive, recovery-oriented, team-based, integrated services for clients with severe mental illness.

Screening for domestic violence among adult women in the United States.

Background: Domestic violence is a problem frequently encountered in health care settings and a risk factor for physical and mental health problems.

Objective: To provide nationally representative estimates of rates of domestic violence screening among women, to identify predictors of screening, and to describe settings where women are screened.

Design And Participants: We examined 4,821 women over the age of 18 from the second wave of Healthcare for Communities, a nationally representative household telephone survey conducted in 2000-2001.

The making of contemporary American psychiatry, Part 2: therapeutics and gender before and after World War II.

In this article, the 2nd in a 2-part series, the authors use patient records from California's Stockton State Hospital to explore the changing role of gender norms and other cultural values in the care of psychiatric patients. The authors show that cultural values are always imbedded in psychiatric practice and that their role in that practice depends on the patients, treatments, and therapeutic rationales present in a given therapeutic encounter. Because the decade following World War II witnessed dramatic changes in psychiatry's patients, therapeutics, and rationales, Stockton State Hospital's patient records from this time period allow the authors to show not only the extent to which gender norms shape psychiatric practice but also how psychiatry's expansion into the problems of everyday life has led to psychiatry taking a more subtle and yet more active role in enforcing societal norms.

Generalizability of studies on mental health treatment and outcomes, 1981 to 1996.

Objective: This study operationalized and measured the external validity, or generalizability, of studies on mental health treatment and outcomes published in four journals between 1981 and 1996.

Method: MEDLINE was searched for articles on mental health treatment and outcomes that were published in four leading psychiatry and psychology journals between 1981 and 1996. A 156-item instrument was used to assess generalizability of study findings.

The making of contemporary American psychiatry, part 1: patients, treatments, and therapeutic rationales before and after World War II.

This article, the 1st in a 2-part series, uses patient records from California's Stockton State Hospital to unearth the midcentury roots of contemporary American psychiatry. These patient records allow the authors to examine 2 transformations: the post-World War II expansion of psychiatry to include the diagnosis and treatment not only of psychotic patients but also of nonpsychotic patients suffering from problems of everyday living, and the 1950s introduction of the first psychotropic drugs, which cemented the medical status of these new disorders, thus linking a new therapeutic rationale to biological understandings of disease. These transformations laid the groundwork for a contemporary psychiatry characterized by voluntary outpatient care, pharmacological treatment of a wide range of behaviors and distress, and a doctor-patient relationship and cultural acceptance of disease that allow psychiatric patients to identify themselves as consumers.