FY07 Annual Report

Fiscal year 2007 has been a year of transition and great progress for the University of Massachusetts DMH Research Center for Excellence - The Center for Mental Health Services Research (CMHSR). It was a year in which our contract with DMH ended and was again put out to bid. The bidding process was an opportunity for us to rethink and strengthen our work with DMH and our priorities. The DMH RFR emphasized the importance of consumer involvement in research as well as addressing the many multicultural issues that affect the delivery of and access to mental health services. Our response to the RFR highlighted our considerable consumer involvement both as staff at the Center and as staff and advisors to individual projects, and the creation of new structures within the Center to protect and emphasize the consumer voice in our work. DMH’s investment in the multicultural issues of mental health services provides great opportunity for us to expand our work in this area with new faculty and research projects. Most notably, we have hired three full-time faculty members whose research focuses on multicultural issues. Thus, in addition to the full-time multicultural specialist that the RFR requested, we recruited both a full-time psychiatrist whose research focuses on trauma and the Latina population, and a faculty researcher working on addiction problems among Asian-Americans with mental illness.

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