The Efficacy of a Psychiatric Halfway House: A Three-year Study of a Therapeutic Residence

Abstract

THE MIXTURE of nonpatient-residents living with patient-residents in the near-natural atmosphere of a psychiatric halfway house seemed instrumental in the general improvement of a majority of the patients in their socialization and self-understanding. Conard House, a comfortable Victorian mansion located in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, was founded as a psychiatric halfway house in 1960 with the aim of aiding a former mental patient's tenuous transition into the community by providing a residential facility that afforded an informal, warm, and supportive milieu. At the inception of this facility a plethora of mental patients was being released from hospitals. They were trying to integrate and establish themselves as members of the community, often under difficult circumstances. Conard House hoped to provide some of this population with the means of reentering the community as functioning members. The study arose then in recognition of the need to help the patient over a tenuous period in his transition into the community and as an effort to demonstrate the value of the Conard House facility for this purpose. The primary project goal was to reveal the efficacy of a halfway house setting which integrates patients with nonpatients. There were four subaims in the project (i.e., to determine what types of former psychiatric patients and mentally retarded persons could most successfully be rehabilitated in this ecological setting, to determine what milieu factors contribute to the rehabilitation of former patients, to develop evaluative measuring devices for use in this setting, and to develop techniques in coordinating these services with other agencies and community services). The assumption was made that the former mental patient and mentally retarded person both experience a similar insecurity upon returning to the community, and as individuals they can achieve strength and autonomy by drawing from the specialized residence milieu of a halfway house. Historically, halfway houses have long been in existence although not technically labeled as such.' Probably the first and most famous facil-