Caramore is a non profit that has been operating in Carrboro and
We exist for the purposes of promoting wellness, managing illness, and facilitating the skills needed to live and work in the community.
We’re a program that treats psychiatric brain disorders and diseases though providing comforting, pleasant, stimulating, and normalized real-world settings where individuals can begin to recover.
Caramore coordinates mental health treatment and offers a highly structured daily living regimen where individuals attain successful employment, suitable housing, financial stability, and achieve independent living.
Mental illness can entail cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal impairments that can severely limit insight. Our rehabilitative setting—involving socialization and employment—works to restore those impairments and behaviors through concentration on daily living skills, medication management, food and nutrition, health and hygiene, and social interaction. The path of rehabilitation is gradual and predicated on time and the individual’s particular needs.
For individuals with severe psychiatric diseases and disorders—where impairments are disabling—the combined approach of medical treatment and 24 hour a day vocational, residential, and social rehabilitative support, is the road to recovery.
Practical concerns that exhaust families—such as navigating doctor’s visits, dealing with pharmacies, consistently and correctly taking prescribed medication, handling SSA benefits or health insurance, teaching budgeting skills and managing money, encouraging good hygiene, paying rent, paying attention to nutrition, encouraging movement and exercise, landing and keeping a job—are all supervised by Caramore counselors.
Work is a critical source of our identity, and so it is with Caramore clients. Caramore clients begin a real job for real money from day one of entering the program. Gradual progression through the program hones disciplined and hard working employees who feel good about themselves, are defined less by their illness, and freed with confidence to pursue their own dreams.
Some successful Caramore clients may participate in “Tier 3,” a long term living situation that entails Caramore’s as-needed support. Tier 3 clients benefit from freedom and independence while knowing that if they need help, they’ll get it. Tier 3 is an excellent solution for the recidivism and episodic nature of mental illness—when things go wrong, Caramore is there to ensure jobs are kept, bank accounts preserved, and apartment leases are maintained.
Caramore exists for the sole purpose of our clients, and the ultimate worth of our services derives from the value and special abilities of our clients—their strengths and talents needed and utilized. We need help and frequently “peers” are employed to fulfill the Caramore mission. Many past clients actively work for us—helping form meaningful relationships with individuals who are in the same seemingly hopeless spot they were once in.
Individuals can get better and do get better at Caramore. It can mean allowing oneself to be helped by a considerable number of people. It can take a lot of time, but inside the supportive, encouraging, and safe environment of Caramore, risks can be taken, mistakes and miscues absorbed, and a new life can start. Caramore is hope, movement, action, and being involved.
