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Read about the Center's collaborative efforts:

Evaluating The System

Increasing Access to Clozapine — Improving Recovery for Hard to Treat Psychosis

Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System — Preventing Criminal Involvement

Illness Management and Recovery on an Inpatient Psychiatric Unit — Making it Easier to Rebound from Hospitalization

Integrating Psychiatric and Medical Care — Supporting Health Care Providers and Keeping Health Costs Manageable

Workforce Development

The Group Home Employee Skills Training Project (GHEST)

Collaborations to
Improve Services

To support the best possible care for people affected by mental illness, we collaborate with and encourage partnerships among numerous individuals and organizations engaged in state, academic, and community programs for mental health. Our public/academic partnerships reflect the belief that our combined wisdom is what empowers us to change lives.

Through many of our partnerships, we collect and analyze real-life data to learn as much as we can about mental illness and to examine our mental health system for possible improvements. Based on that data, we suggest methods to modify care, and provide a variety of meaningful opportunities for learning and recovery.

In addition to participating with efforts designed to look closely at North Carolina's system of care, Center staff also commit time and resources to build a shared vision for high-quality, effective services by:

  • Providing workforce development training for mental health professionals, researchers and academia, and the community at large. We embrace an interdisciplinary approach to mental health, recognizing the value of different perspectives and the strengths in combining different approaches to care. 
  • Serving on planning committees and boards for a variety of mental health agencies and organizations, including: the North Carolina Psychiatric Association, local National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) boards, the OPC Providers Council, and the board of Club Nova Community, Inc. 
  • Lending our expertise to those who can benefit from it the most. We share our insight and serve as trainers with academic institutions, research organizations, mental health clinics and hospitals, community organizations, private practitioners, policy makers, and more.
Myths View all myths

It's a chemical imbalance/brain disorder that you can test for.

Although we think schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental brain disorder that may involve chemical imbalances and possibly structural differences in the brain, we can't test for it at present. Researchers are exploring use of the human genome (map of genes both at the individual and larger group level), neuroimaging (highly detailed pictures of the brain), and electrophysiology (study of the brain's activity), to try to find indicators of illness. They are learning a great deal, but to date no markers that could be used as a test have emerged. (Source: OASIS Early Psychosis Toolkit)