COSP Study Sites:
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
Friends Connection (FC) is a community-based program of the Mental
Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania (MHASP) that is administratively
controlled and operated by consumers, FC is designed to provide peer counseling
and support through the provision of social and leisure skill development for consumers
with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders. The program has
been in existence since 1989.
FC provides intensive one-to-one support to promote recovery. It works with
individual s teaching them a better way of life that is clean and sober with new
people, places, and things in the community. All staff members are recovering
and stable in their mental health issues. Consumers learn leisure skills and are
linked to a 12-step programs in the community, such as Double Trouble for dually
diagnosed, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Narcotics Anonymous. Peer staffers model
how to share their experience in the 12-step model and help them begin to
establish support networks with other recovering people.
The Pennsylvania study represents a strengthening of an existing productive partnership
between the MHASP, the Philadelphia Office of Mental Health, and evaluators at
the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Mental Health Policy and Services
Research.
For more information about Friends Connection, contact:
Jeanie Whitecraft at (215)
599-4011
5400
Arsenal Street