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Youth residential mental health care is often a last resort after a long time searching for help. Despite engaging with residential care, moving from residential mental health programs to life in the community, many youth still confront disturbing prospects. Incorporating vignettes, chapter summaries, as well as theory and evidence in fields such as education, juvenile justice, child welfare, independent living, supporting families, and positive youth development, this book proposes a template that is both credible and feasible for improving community living outcomes for youth leaving residential mental health programs.

Taking a critical and radical approach, this book calls for a return to mental health social work that has personal relationships and an emotional connection between workers and those experiencing distress at its core. The optimism that underpinned the development of community care policies has dissipated to be replaced by a form of bleak managerialism. Neoliberalism has added stress to services already under great pressure and created a danger that we could revert to institutional forms of care. This much-needed book argues that the original progressive values of community care policies need to be rediscovered, updated and reinvigorated to provide a basis for a mental health social work that returns to fundamental notions of dignity and citizenship.

Often people with mental illness feel alone in society, with no place to go and little hope. Their isolation can be further perpetuated through typical approaches to treatment, such as case management and psychotherapy.Since 1948, the Fountain House'working community'has worked to address the isolation and social stigmatization faced by people with mental illness. This volume describes in detail its evidence-based, cost-effective, and replicable model, which produces substantive outcomes in employment, schooling, housing, and general wellness. Through an emphasis on personal choice, professional and patient collaboration, and, most important,'the need to be needed,'Fountain House demonstrates that people with serious mental illness can not only live but also contribute and thrive in society.The authors also explore the evolution of Fountain House practice, which is grounded in social work and psychiatry and informs current strength-based and recovery methodologies. Its inherent humanity, social inclusivity, message of personal empowerment, and innovation—a unique approach on behalf of people suffering from mental illness—have led to the paradigm's worldwide adoption.