Cross-Disability approaches and solutions to mental health community inclusion

Cross-disability research and practice in the area of societal inclusion can inform efforts to achieve greater inclusion for consumers with mental health disabilities. Despite scattered recognition of this idea, the mental health community has often not sought to learn from the cross-disability community's inclusion pursuits. Examining cross-disability understandings of barriers, enhancers, and solutions for achieving inclusion assists educating the mental health community about benefits from learning from cross-disability work in inclusion. Thus, the researcher conducted a review of cross-disability research, practice, and policy to identify barriers, enhancers, and strategies for inclusion of people with disabilities to support mental health inclusion. Identified barriers included rigid funding streams, stigmatizing attitudes and stereotyping patterns, segregated cultural norms and traditions, paucity of targeted services for community inclusion enhancement, and socio-cultural and physical accessibility barriers. Identified enhancers included flexible funding streams, empowering attitudes and value systems (focused on societal enhancement of inclusion), universal design approaches to support, targeted services, and broad-based thinking for provision of accessibility accommodations. Developing practices for enhancing community inclusion include communities of practice for communication and resource exchange in service system innovation, expansion of collaborations and partnerships between disability and non-disabled organizations (e.g. in labor, education, healthcare, etc.), empowerment of voices of consumers with disabilities, adoption of flexible, adaptive, approaches to disability service-delivery, and implementation of inclusion-strengthening assistive and augmentative technologies. This session will discuss in detail these barriers, enhancers, and solutions for achieving inclusion for people with disabilities and challenges in translating them from cross-disability work to mental health work.