Introduction to the special issue on individual placement and support.

Abstract

This issue of the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal presents an update on individual placement and support (IPS), the evidence-based practice of supported employment for people with psychiatric disabilities. The papers in this special issue testify to the enormous potential of the IPS model. Clients, families, researchers, policy experts, practitioners, and administrators continue to identify creative ways to expand services to reach more people. The state of the art of IPS is expanding, changing, and ramifying broadly. IPS is appearing in middle-income countries in Latin America and in new populations, such as young adults with autism-spectrum disorders in Europe. Continued growth should follow the fundamental principles of values and science. First, we must honor basic values by listening to and learning from clients (Strickler, 2014), as well from IPS trainers, mental health and vocational rehabilitation leaders, and practitioners who face the daily realities of developing and sustaining recovery-oriented services (Swanson et al., 2014). Second, we must insist on rigorous research to ground our employment services in hard evidence.