Waccamaw Center for Mental Health

Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)
 

The Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) involves a team of professionals whose job duties focus solely on providing service to urban consumers. ACT seeks to reach out to consumers who are not accessing the tradition Center programs. A comprehensive approach to assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation is a feature of this program in which the team assumes full responsibility for delivering, coordinating and/or acquiring services in a wide variety of areas, not simply mental health care. Primary health, housing, employment, and access to entitlements such as Social Security are example of psychosocial variables, which contribute to overall improvement of a person with mental health, and all are areas in which the ACT team may get involved.

1. Criteria:
   Adults with serious, long term mental illness.
   High users of inpatient and emergency room services.
   Persons who have not responded to traditional case management services.
   Persons who fail to keep scheduled appointments.

ASSERTIVE COMMUNITY TREATMENT – LIKE PROGRAM

(A.C.T. – L) IN GEORGETOWN COUNTY

The W.C.M.H. received funds in two years ago to develop and implement an Assertive Community Treatment-L-Program (ACT-L) in Georgetown. The purpose of the ACT-Like Program is to serve clients who are not accessing the traditional Center Programs, by providing a comprehensive approach to the delivery of services.

Services are provided to psychiatrically disabled adults living in Georgetown County. Because of their mental illness, these individuals have difficulty functioning in the community. Clients in the ACT-L program have histories of long and frequent hospitalizations and limited success with independent living, and finding and maintaining employment. They also over utilize the hospitals emergency rooms to treat their psychiatric illness. A host of supportive individually designed interventions are required to maintain these individuals in the community, which is what the ACT-L Team is designed to do. Currently the ACT-L has two master-level clinicians and a B.A. level clinician.

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