Living in the community: Training housing officers in mental health

Abstract

Housing officers usually have very little training in mental health issues and yet most of them encounter problems relating to mental illness. They have to cope with a wide range of problems including coping with intoxicated or violent clients, becoming closely involved with residents and feeling hopeless and overwhelmed by their problems, frequent verbal abuse and occasional physical violence and coping with complaints from neighbours of people behaving bizarrely. A training course was developed based on the need to deal with these events. Ninety housing officers were trained over a six month period.