Reports with lasting value.

• American Psychological Association’s Best Practices for Recovery (PDF)
  A “catalogue of interventions,” assessment tools and contact information for clinicians and program directors.
• An Employers Guide to Behavioral Health Services (PDF)
  This 2005 report from the National Business Group contains useful recommendations while it outlines the costs of ignoring insurance coverage for mental illnesses. It has been credited with influencing employers to change their policies to expand coverage for employees and their families.
• Helping Families to Help Their Loved Ones With Serious Mental Illness—A White Paper (PDF)
  From New York State’s affiliate of the Alliance of Mentally Illness, this 2006 report identifies unmet need and untapped resources that could become part of a program for comprehensive support services to families. Provocative and timely, it structures thinking about how to incorporate families in the highly fragmented field that has, too often, left then weary and their relative no better off.
• Justice, Treatment, and Cost: An Evaluation of the Fiscal Impact of Allegheny County Mental Health Court
  A RAND Report of the fiscal impact of mental health courts in Alleghency County, Pennsylvania. The report includes information about finances, sample and methodology, with charts, graphs and a discussion of how they determined net savings and applicability to other locations.
• Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness
  An exceptional report from Human Rights Watch (2003) documenting the routine neglect and abuse of incarcerated people with mental illness. Heavily footnoted with data derived from research reports, government testimony, interviews, court rulings, and with case studies of New York, Vermont, California and Montana.
• Medicaid Managed Care for Persons with Severe Mental Illness. (PDF)
  A (pdf) report from the Medicaid Institute at the United Hospital Fund of New York. Although the focus and data analysis is primarily New York, the issues it addresses are national in scope.
• Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates (PDF)
  A 2005 report by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics confirming that more than half of the prisoners in American jails and prisons have a mental health problem.
• Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (1999)
  A voluminous report detailing state of the art treatments, research and current needs to build a mental health system. Easy to access in pdf. or html files, and chapter outlines provide detailed contents. A must for novices trying to understand the American so-called system.
• New Freedom Commission
  A widely heralded report about mental health that looks for community based treatments, eliminates barriers to access and uses the benchmark of recovery, not maintenance, for people with mental illnesses.
• Opportunities Lost: Businesses Speak Out About the U.S. Health Care System
  The Center for American Progress provides studies of ten businesses, ranging from small operations with four employees to multinationals, that discuss the impact of health insurance and costs.
• Violence Against Women with Mental Illness
  This report from the Council of State Governments highlights the unique instances and frequency of violence against women with mental illness, an important starting point for activists, policy makers or legislators.



• The Report
  Called simply “The Report” this document from the Council of State Governments is an eye-opener showing how the criminal justice continuum has made mental illness a crime and filled the jails and prisons with people in need of services.