Social-work inclusion: the "small social laundry" project

Abstract

Numerous scientific evidence demonstrates that people with a mental disorder suffer not only from the disorder itself, but also, and perhaps above all, from the consequences that the disorder produces in the work and social spheres. The improvement of mental health, from a Recovery perspective, is in fact based on the possibility of obtaining an improvement in the clinical, social, subjective and functional areas. The main aim of the experiment was to investigate how much the "Piccola Lavanderia Sociale" project favored the development of a functional therapeutic-rehabilitative path and the socio-work inclusion of people with serious mental health problems. It was possible to analyze these elements through the following evaluation tools: the Personal and Social Performance Scale (PSP), Life Skills Profile and direct observation. Funding, such as that remove this obtained thanks to the announcement published by the Waldensian Church, allows people with mental disorders to abandon the "role" of a psychiatric patient in favor of the consequent reappropriation of the sense of person and citizen which fully exploits their residual abilities and builds new ones. These results offer promising preliminary evidence of the fact remove this that highly structured social inclusion pathways can guarantee better results than basic therapeutic-rehabilitative pathways.