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Full-Text Articles in Social Work
Tautology And Coercion In Assertive Community Treatment (Act): The "Treatment Effect" Of Assertive Community Treatment Deconstructed., Tomi Gomory
Tomi Gomory
Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) has been identified as one of only six evidence-based practices for the severely mentally ill by federal, private foundation, and professional mental health experts. This article reviews the research of the inventors of ACT (the Madison Wisconsin ACT group) because their model is the criterion for all ACT replications. The focus is on the well known, but mysterious “disappearance” of ACT effect when ACT “interventions” cease. The analysis concludes provocatively that there is no ACT clinical effect in the first place. What actually is measured by these researchers and claimed incorrectly as “clinical” treatment effect is …
The Origins Of Coercion In Assertive Community Treatment: A Review Of Early Publications From The Special Treatment Unit Of Mendota State Hospital., Tomi Gomory
Tomi Gomory
This article argues that Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is fundamentally and historically based on the uncritical but societally well accepted view that medically justified coercion (punishment or unwanted treatment) is therapeutic. It documents this claim by reviewing the early professional history and the resultant publications of the inventors of ACT (originally known as Training in Community Living), consisting of psychiatrists, social workers, and psychologists who trained and worked during the 1960s through the 1980s, at Mendota State Hospital (eventually renamed Mendota Mental Health Institute) in Wisconsin.