Introduction

SUMMARY

The Women, Co-occurring Disorders and Violence Study is the first effort to address the significant lack of appropriate services for women with alcohol and other drug and mental health diagnoses who have experienced physical and/or sexual abuse. This program is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's three Centers: the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the Center for Mental Health Services. The nine participating sites each developed a services integration intervention addressing the multiple needs of women with co-occurring disorders and histories of violence. As participants in a cross-site initiative, each site created their interventions within the guidelines established by a Federal Steering Committee. Under these guidelines, interventions must be gender-specific, culturally competent, trauma-informed and trauma-specific, comprehensive and integrated, and involve consumers/survivors/recovering persons (CSRs) in substantive and meaningful ways. In this work, each site describes their strategies for developing strategies for integrating services at two levels: at the clinical/individual level and at the services or system level. Within this framework, sites have created programs that are responsive to the strengths and needs of their own communities.

Key Words:

• Alcoholism
• drug abuse
• mental health
• women
• physical abuse
• sexual abuse
• services integration