Mental Health: A Report by the Surgeon General

Over the past two decades, the Federal government established a series of initiatives to support families. Parents were given progressively greater roles as decisionmakers with the passage of the Education of the Handicapped Act in 1975 and its successor legislation, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Acts of 1991 and 1997. For simplicity, these pieces of legislation are collectively referred to hereinafter as the IDEA Act. This act requires parent involvement in decisions about educating children with disabilities. It guarantees that all children with disabilities receive free and appropriate public education. It also provides funding assistance to states for implementation.

A novel approach taken by some community-level systems of care to encouraging involvement of families is to train and hire family members into a wide range of well-paying, career-ladder jobs as outreach workers, service coordinators (sometimes called case managers), and direct support services providers. These positions are critical to achieving major program goals because they make it possible for children and families to remain together and to participate in the more clinical components of their service plan. Family members are also employed as supervisors of services, involved in hiring staff, providing them with orientation and on-the-job training (e.g., of case managers), overseeing their work, and evaluating their performance. They also participate in research.

Beginning in 1989, the Child and Adolescent Service System Program, a component of the Center for Mental Health Services, began providing some support for statewide family organizations through a series of funding and technical assistance mechanisms (Koroloff et al., 1991; Briggs et al., 1994; also see Integrated System Model). Such organizations were funded to develop statewide networks of information and support for families, to coordinate with other organizations that shared common goals, and to promote needed changes. Currently, Federal funding for 22 statewide family organizations is provided through the Child and Family Branch, Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Support and technical assistance to community-level family organizations are also provided by the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and other family-run consumer organizations.

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