The article I found this week is called “Poverty and Serious Mental Illness: Toward Action on a Seemingly Intracatable Problem” by John Sylvestre (2017). It is a literature review that argues for community health programs that address larger groups of people rather than just individuals. The program would utilize collaboration of expertise between community psychologists and practitioners from other various fields. The question the article wants to answer is “what would be an effective strategy to combat poverty on a large scale?” and uses previous research that has been done to argue their points. When discussing the definition of what constitutes poverty and how it comes about, the author focuses on the lack of voice people stuck in poverty have and the shame and stigma they have experienced as a result. He claims that the relationship between serious mental illness and poverty is due to marginalization of people who suffer from them, resulting in lack of opportunities to advocate for themselves or find a way of making an income in order to meet their basic needs. The article suggests improving methods of tracking poverty throughout the country and taking steps towards the CMH community adopting a policy that benefits these people that matches the level of investment put into individual-level interventions. Inaction on a community level by CMH services and the government ignores the root issue of what causes poverty for people who suffer from serious mental illnesses. I found this article really interesting and found that it made a lot of good points that I am interested in including while further developing my research project proposal. I did think the article could have been a bit more organized regarding the points the author was trying to make. While the community based psychology programs and getting to the root of what the authors pinpoint to be the cause of poverty for people with mental illnesses, there were a lot of other sub-points that were mixed in and easy to gloss over or side-tracked from finishing a previous thought (at least that’s how I saw it, it could just be me).

Sylvestre, J., Notten, G., Kerman, N., Polillo, A., Czechowki, K. (2017). Poverty and Serious Mental Illness: Toward Action on a Seemingly Intractable Problem. American Journal of Community Psychology. (Volume 61, Iss. 1-2, pp. 153-165).