The previous issue of Healing Hands (“Innovative Approaches for Mental Health Care and Homelessness”) highlighted programs that have developed innovative, creative, and holistic approaches to supporting the mental and behavioral health of clients in the context of homelessness. We looked at some of the key barriers to behavioral health care, then learned about three organizations’ innovative approaches to supporting the mental health care of their clients—including shelter-based psychiatric care, street therapy, and “foot psychiatry.”
One clear lesson from these innovative approaches is that mental health care provision is strengthened by ecosystemic thinking. A person experiencing a mental health crisis or long-term challenge does not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in a web of conditions and relationships, including the conditions and relationships that exist with individual care providers and organizations that seek to serve them—and the well-being of the care providers themselves is also part of this complicated web. Organizations that are deliberate about also supporting the well-being of the care providers are better equipped to support the needs of clients.
In this issue of Healing Hands, we’ll expand upon this ecosystemic approach to mental health care, taking a look at how organizations can create cultures of care that also mindfully support the mental health and well-being of care providers themselves, including clinicians, staff members, volunteers, and other participants in these communities of care.
We’ll begin with a look at some of the challenges facing health care providers, with special attention to stress, burnout, and compassion fatigue. We will consider some individual and organizational-level prevention strategies and interventions for burnout that exist in the interplay between self-care and community care. We’ll include the role of mindfulness and culture change, and note some other key approaches that organizations can consider in order to support and prioritize the multi-faceted and interconnected mental health, well-being, and resiliency of all members of the care community.
