This paper describes the early findings o f a supported education program (SEP) at a New York City-located state hospital that was created to provide seriously mentally ill consumers residing in the community with increased rehabilitative options. This program is a hybrid o f a mobile type SEP and a counseling service for the college bound. The focus o f the program concentrates on elevating the functioning o f the most seriously ill outpatients and relies upon a consortium o f three colleges. Preliminary data indicate that this program effort was as important to consumers for the goals clarification it offered as it was for the increased access it gave them to higher education. Additionally, the records o f participating patients suggest that a number o f complex dynamics spontaneously evolved in the patient referral process that were unexpected vis-a-vis staff intent. Finally, the implications o f having this sponsored by a state hospital place particular demands on the communication skills o f the clinicians who work with college faculty. The rewards for implementing this program are promising and send an important message o f hope to all those concerned with the fate o f services for the seriously mentally ill.No generally available life experience is more associated with the American birthright of fulfilling one's own potential than a college education. Yet few rehabilitative ventures for people with serious mental illness are associated with as much skepticism and hope as are education programs. The doubts originate from the history of disappointments and frustrations reported by clinicians working with this population over a long period (Liberman, 1988). Part and parcel of these beliefs is the notion that the cognitive deficits, which are the hallmark of major mental disorders, automatically eliminate the possibility of any academic success. Fortunately, a wave of countervailing hope is arising from the growing number of supportive education programs asserting that a variety of approaches, flexibly tailored to the needs of mentally ill patients who are aspiring to be students, are This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

This article describes a community mental health agency's process of screening supportive housing applicants with histories of violent felonies and serious mental illness. The agency adopted its corporate intranet as a tool so that geographically dispersed senior staff could participate in information gathering in order to ensure expert input in admissions decisions. This broad-based participation was designed to maintain community safety, while making the agency's residential resources available to people with mental illness and criminal histories. Considering the high recidivism rate of ex-offenders with mental illness and lack of clearly established best practices to serve them in the community, the authors believe that it is timely for housing providers to reevaluate how to better serve these individuals.

The sexual associations and associative latencies of repressers and sensitizers to double entendre and asexual stimulus words were studied under conditions of sexual arousal and nonarousal. The results indicated (a) that sexual arousal led to an increment in sexual responses primarily for sensitizers, (6) that sensitizers gave more sexual associations than repressers, with the effect being more marked under sexual arousal conditions, and (c) that sexual stimulation produced a decrement in the speed with which sensitizers give discrete associations to asexual stimulus words. The independent variables had no effects on the speed with which associations were given to double entendre sexual words. The results seemed generally consistent with prior data and theory concerning repression-sensitization.Research concerning differences between repressers and sensitizers in their responses to sexual stimuli and to ambiguous stimuli has constituted an important part of the attempt to collect construct validity evidence for the Repression-Sensitization scale (Byrne, 1961). The construct of repression-sensitization was, in fact, historically formulated partially on the basis of research dealing with perceptual and associative reactions to words with sexual connotations (Bruner & Postman, 1947;Byrne, 1964).Theoretically, it has generally been assumed that sexual stimuli constitute conditioned anxiety elicitors for a sizable segment of the American population. Since repressers presumably cope with anxiety by attempts to avoid the anxiety-arousing stimulus and its consequents while sensitizers cope with anxiety by attempts to approach and master the stimulus and its consequents, there should be predictable differences between the two groups in their responses to a wide variety of sexual stimuli. In addition, part of the theory concerning repression-sensitization concerns the fashion in which repressers and sensitizers interpret ambiguous stimulus materials. Given stimulus materials that permit either an anxiety-arousing interpretation or an

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