Questions about psychosis or voices? Feel like someone you know is slipping through the cracks? Unsure how to help or what to do?

Project Resource was created to address a series of major gaps facing people with psychosis and their family members (in the South Bay and beyond).  These include out-dated or misleading information about psychosis, lack of access to important treatments and interventions (including emerging best practices in the psychosocial treatment of psychosis), and outreach and anti-stigma and discrimination efforts that often fail to address the institutional and structural barriers that far too many youth and adults with psychosis face.

Our group approaches psychosis as a diverse, multi-faceted set of experiences with complex and variable causes.  These include socioenviromental factors such as ethnicity and ethnic density, childhood adversity, and poverty as well as genetic, epigenetic and biological factors.  We view healing from psychosis as an equally variable and complex process that depends not just on symptom reduction, but on the integration of experiences and diagnosis with personal and cultural identities, the recovery of valued social roles, and independent living.

In addition to increased supports for peers and family members, we see structural change as central to improving the lives of those with mental health challenges.  These include substantive attempts to acknowledge and address structural discrimination including incarceration (or the criminalization of mental illness), and educational and vocational disparities that stem from policies and practices which work to exclude those with a history of psychiatric disabilities.

We also recognize that psychosis does not affect all communities equally and that the relationships between culture, race and psychosis are often very complex.  In general, families and peers from under-represented minority groups face serious mental health disparities both in treatment and with respect to the validation of different cultural explanations of (and approaches to) psychosis and related experiences.