National Research and Training Center (NRTC)

Online Education Courses

The Center offers Online Education Courses for a range of stakeholders in human service systems including consumers/peers, family members, providers, researchers, policymakers, students, administrators, and government officials.

• Implementing Mental Health Evidence-Based Practices: The Case of Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP)

  In this 8-module online course, academic and consumer faculty describe a comprehensive approach for successfully introducing evidence-based practices (EBPs) with fidelity and positive outcomes for service users. The EBP Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP) is used as an example of how knowledge generated through science can be introduced on a wide scale in real-world settings.

• Community Integration: Supporting People In Getting What They Want

  In this 6-module course, faculty of the UPenn Collaborative on Community Integration of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities provide an overview of community integration that is based on self-determination values, disability theory, research evidence, and successful practices.
  

Webcasts and Web-Based Workshops

The Center's webcasts and web-based workshops emphasize current trends in behavioral health including evidence-based practices, consumer-operated services, and human service systems and policy issues.

• Evidence-Based Practice: What It Is & Why It’s Importantto Family Advocates

  In this audio-visual web cast, learn what makes a mental health service qualify for designation as an “evidence-based practice” (EBP), and why that matters to family members and other advocates. National experts describe how research evidence is “graded” to reflect its quality, characterize the level of evidence for NAMI family-led education, and discuss EBPs in mental health care such as supported employment. The leader of a statewide NAMI organization offers a family perspective on EBP, and discusses how to advocate for research to advance the status of promising practices in your community.

• Systems Advocacy: What It Is and How to Do It

  In this presentation, an internationally known mental health advocate and community organizer discusses grassroots organizing tactics and provides information about goal-setting, creating an advocacy plan, negotiation skills, and strategy development, including "do’s and don'ts." The presentation also offers nuts-and-bolts information about effective advocacy letter-writing, phone calls to policy makers and their staffs, and how to handle face-to-face meetings. Because the basis of systems advocacy is self-advocacy, a co-presenter who has been trained in self-advocacy skills offers information about how she has put these skills into practice in her own work and life.

• Self-Management of Psychiatric Symptoms: Taking Action to Achieve Recovery
  The featured speakers of this workshop, Suzanne Vogel-Scibilia and Mary Ellen Copeland, addressed self-management of psychiatric disabilities by teaching participants how to develop a comprehensive, individualized self monitoring and response system. This system: promotes higher levels of wellness and stability for people who experience psychiatric symptoms; decreases the incidence of severe symptoms; decreases traumatic life events and stigma caused by severe symptoms; decreases the need for costly, invasive therapies; and improves quality of life. The speakers also highlighted models and history of recovery and self-determination. A total of 115 people from around the country attended this workshop, held May 31, 2002, including mental health consumers, psychiatric survivors, family members, service providers, advocates, researchers, governmental officials, students, and faculty.
• Multiple Perspectives on Consumer/Survivor Self-Determination from Within and Outside the Services System.
  On October 12, 2001, the UIC NRTC sponsored this inaugural session for its National Self-Determination Workshop Series. The featured speakers (Judith Cook, Judi Chamberlin, David Oaks, Joseph Rogers, and Russell Pierce) addressed various aspects of self-determination, including the history of self-advocacy in the mental health consumer movement, the role of independent organizing in increasing self-determination, what helps and hinders self-determination, and advancing consumer power in communities of difference. A total of 81 people attended this workshop from around the country, including mental health consumers, psychiatric survivors, family members, service providers, advocates, researchers, governmental officials, students, and faculty.