Skip to Main Content

Michael Rowe, PhD

Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry
DownloadHi-Res Photo

Additional Titles

Director, Citizens Community Collaborative, Yale Department of Psychiatry

About

Titles

Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry

Director, Citizens Community Collaborative, Yale Department of Psychiatry

Biography

Much of my research and writing over the past 20 years concerns “citizenship” as an applied theoretical framework for the social inclusion and participation of people with mental illnesses. Citizenship, in my and my colleagues’ work, is defined as a person's strong connection to the 5 Rs of rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships that society offers its recognized members, along with a sense of belonging that is validated by others. This research is organized under the Citizens Community Collaborative (CCC) at the Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH) of the Department of Psychiatry and Connecticut Mental Health Center. Study/intervention components with DMHAS funding include the Citizens Project, a 6-month intervention for people with mental illness and previous incarcerations; community-connection work including Project Connect and F.A.C.E.; financial health and empowerment supports; measurement, clinical tools, and manual development; and a statewide learning collaborative to take citizenship to scale in Connecticut. Among other funders are NIMH and the Melville Charitable Trust.

Related to this work is my past and continuing writing and research on homelessness and mental health outreach and peer-informed interventions for people with mental illnesses. I also write and have conducted research in the areas of narrative medicine, patient-doctor relationships, high-technology medicine, and medical errors. I am also conducting research on interventions to support “motive control” for people with strong revenge feelings against those who have wronged them.

I am Director of the CCC, Chair of the International Recovery and Citizenship Collaborative (IRCC), Co-Director of the Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, and Editor of The Perch, a Yale literary, visual arts, and music journal.

Appointments

Education & Training

PhD
Yale University (1996)
MPA
University of Hartford (1990)

Research

Overview

My research proceeds from the idea that the foundation of mental health and mental illness is social; thus mental health care must include attention to the client/patient as a person living in society and in relationship with others. In the 1990s I studied mental health outreach to people who are homeless (outreach work). In outreach work, clinicians leave their offices to find, make contact, and build trust with people who, often, are avoiding contact with mental health professionals due to their previous negative experiences with them. Outreach workers move at the client’s pace, gradually introducing a range of services including primary care, access to entitlement income, and housing, hoping eventually to persuade people to accept mental health care. I see the encounters between homeless people and outreach workers as social encounters taking place at the psychological, socioeconomic, and physical boundaries of society. These social encounters involve transactions and negotiations regarding both instrumental goods such as housing and access to income, and affective goods including one’s future identity as a ‘mental patient.’

I found that, in addition to making health care and substantial resources such as housing and income available to their clients, outreach workers often were, at the same time, conferring upon them a status of ‘program citizenship,’ with dependence on clinicians and other care workers for much of their social contact. This finding led me to citizenship as a framework for support of the social inclusion and participation in society of people with mental illnesses. My colleagues and I define citizenship as the person’s strong connection to the 5 R’s of rights, responsibilities, roles, resources, and relationships that society makes available to its members through public and social institutions and associational and civic life. Our research has included individual and group citizenship interventions with program manualization, development of an individual measure of citizenship, and citizenship-oriented mental health care with community supports and access to valued community roles, for people with mental illness including those who are further marginalized by homelessness, addictions, and criminal charges. This research includes a randomized clinical trial (RCT) that found reduced substance and alcohol use and increased quality of life for citizenship participants compared to those receiving usual care. The deployment of peers as staff, and later as researchers, has been a core principle and practice of citizenship interventions since our finding, from another RCT, that peer staff have a unique facility for engaging previously unengaged persons into treatment and self-help groups such as AA and NA.

My research and writing in the fields of bioethics and narrative medicine are, in one way, distinct from my research and writing in mental health. A thread that runs through both domains, however, is the relationship between patients (or clients) and doctors, clinicians, and other helpers in the context of the professional, social, and institutional settings within which these relationships, and these forms of care, occur. In addition, I am now conducting cutting edge research on 'motive control' for people with strong vengeance cravings for past wrongs with my colleague James Kimmel, J.D. and other researchers at the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH).

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena; Health Care; Humanities; Psychiatry and Psychology

Research at a Glance

Yale Co-Authors

Frequent collaborators of Michael Rowe's published research.

Publications

2023

2021

2019

2018

2017

Clinical Trials

Current Trials

Academic Achievements & Community Involvement

  • activity

    Citizenship intervention and measure development

  • activity

    Mental health research

  • honor

    2012 First Place, Clinical Innovations in Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry: “The Citizenship Intervention”2012 First Place, Clinical Innovations in Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry: “The Citizenship Intervention”

Get In Touch

Contacts

Academic Office Number
Mailing Address

Psychiatry

319 Peck Street, Bldg 1

New Haven, CT 06513

United States

Administrative Support