National Alliance on Mental Illness
page printed from http://www.nami.org/
(800) 950-NAMI; info@nami.org
©2013
 

About PACT

"PACT was the ultimate key to my functioning again. The help, support, and superb workers helped me deal with my problems, while staying out of the hospitals. I was not treated as an ill person, but as a human being who has suffered greatly from mental illness and who, most important, needed support and friendship."

Dylan Abraham, consumer, PACT
Emergency services support counselor, Madison, Wisconsin

"No psychosocial intervention has influenced current community mental health care more than assertive community treatment …By far the most carefully defined, well documented, and successful of these interventions was developed in Madison, Wisconsin, where a group of clinicians and researchers established an intensive program of community care that has since been known as assertive community treatment."

Drake and Burnes in Psychiatric Services, July 1995

"There is no question that the PACT model is essential for persons with severe and persistent mental illnesses to move forward with their lives and enjoy some aspects of living with more independence in the community. If people think PACT is expensive, compare PACT to the cost to warehouse people in institutions and, now more and more, in jails. What is the cost to the individual who goes without appropriate community treatment."

Nancy Abraham
Mother, first president of NAMI Wisconsin

About NAMI PACT Manual

"NAMI’s manual for PACT start-up is exactly what administrators and program developers need to replicate this model of care that serves persons with severe mental illness. Better implementation of this well-researched model will lead to improved outcomes for individuals families, and behavioral health care systems."

Don Gilbert
Commissioner, Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

"The PACT manual is a milestone because now NAMI members have a detailed, written description of how the PACT model really keeps people functioning in the community and improves the quality of their lives. I want to tell families to quote, copy, steal, and snatch pieces or the whole thing for newsletters, speeches, and promotion with doctors and clinicians."

Beverly Young
Mother, affiliate founder, NAMI, Verona, Wisconsin

"This manual contains the distillations of the wisdom of the nation’s leading experts in PACT. It is required reading for all who are establishing PACT teams, the most effective program for people with severe mental illness."

Daniel J. McCarthy
Rhode Island Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation

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