Israeli Psychiatric Rehabilitation Associaition
BGU’s Spitzer Department of Social Work and the Beer-Sheva Mental Health Center are collaborating to promote psychiatric rehabilitation for people with psychiatric disorders, to support individuals with serious mental illnesses in their personal goals and attainment of a meaningful life.
With the support of the Tauber Foundation and the Israeli Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association (ISPRA), Prof. Marianne Farkas (pictured below during the course) from the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, recently taught an intensive 4 day course on readiness rehabilitation. This focuses on exploring and encouraging setting goals in valued roles in the working, learning and living environments.
Thirty participants, graduate students, social workers, directors of services and psychiatrists attended the course. Students claimed the course provided a new outlook on the possibilities, approach and understanding of these individual's challenges and ways to help them.
This course is part of a series of events that are held under the above stated collaboration, following a conference that was held in February at BGU on readiness rehabilitation, which was attended by over 300 participants from the mental health and rehabilitation services in the south and across the country.
This initiative is headed by Dr. Galia Moran, and supported by Prof. Julia Mirsky, former head of the Department of Social Work, together with Dr. Max Lachman from ISPRA, and Prof. Zeev Kaplan , Ms. Anat Shalev, Ms. Linor Rehav and others from the Beer-Sheva Mental Health Center. It involves a training program which provides social workers academic knowledge and skills by experts in recovery and rehabilitation from Israel and internationally renowned scholars.
The Department sees this program as leading system transformation through teaching, training and research. Overall, this endeavor is part of several action and research steps taken over the past five years in an attempt to move forward the vision of transforming the mental health center at Beer Sheva to a recovery oriented person-center facility, positioning Beer Sheva alongside contemporary international initiatives in the mental health field.
