Beyond Treatment. How Clubhouses for People Living with Serious Mental Illness Transform Lives and Save Money: A Conversation with Fountain House

Heart Forward Conversations from the Heart

In this episode, we visit with two representatives from Fountain House in New York. Our primary intent was to provide a platform to share the results of a recent research report issued by Fountain House: Beyond Treatment: How Clubhouses for People Living with Serious Mental Illness Transform Lives and Save Money.

This first of its kind analysis not only offers a fuller accounting of the fiscal and societal costs of untreated mental illness — looking beyond health care spending to include lost wages and productivity, disability benefits, repeated emergency room visits, and criminal justice impacts — but demonstrates how clubhouses are uniquely positioned to drive down spending across the board.

The report finds that if clubhouses were appropriately resourced and expanded to serve even just five percent of the 15.4 million adults in the U.S. who live with serious mental illness, the net societal benefit would exceed $8.5 billion and offer a dramatic improvement in quality of life for countless individuals, their families, and their communities.

The report notes that the U.S. has historically spent most of its mental health care dollars on clinical treatment, such as medication and therapy, with a fraction allocated to fund the community-based social supports people also need to manage their mental illness. These are policy decisions that can and should be changed.

Fountain House is knitting together a national network of clubhouses to help amplify voices throughout the country to underscore the importance of the clubhouse model as a compelling mental health intervention that should be more robustly funded.

The bios for our two guests are linked on the Fountain House website.

Rev. Dr. Phillip Fleming wears many hats, including member, certified peer specialist and member of the Fountain House board of directors.

Dr. Joshua Seidman is the Chief Research and Knowledge Officer.

Other resources and reports mentioned in this interview:

Community as Therapy: The Theory of Social Practice. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal. 12/23.

Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic. National Institute of Health.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the general population: A systematic review PubMed Central. 2020.

Project to Evaluate the Impact of Fountain House Programs on Medicaid Utilization and Expenditures. NYU. 2017.

UCLA loneliness scale

Quality of life measure

Brief inventory of thriving

Clubhouse International: Mental Illness Recovery - Clubhouse International (clubhouse-intl.org)
Dec 2020 Interview with then CEO of Fountain House, Dr. Ashwin Vasan.