Caramore offers immediate jobs

If you are appropriate for our program, Caramore gives you a real job the minute you walk through our door regardless of your illness, past, criminal record, education, or lack of references. You immediately begin making money and have a place to live in one of our two family-oriented homes.

Our landscaping and professional cleaning businesses are real for-profit services valued in the community and will serve as an excellent reference for your next job.

We give you a real job and a comfortable place to live—with low hours and low stress— to gently get you accustomed to working, living, and interacting socially again.

But it’s all very temporary. With the right attitude and effort you may be—within just weeks—ready to interview for a job in Chapel Hill or Carrboro, and move to our apartments to enjoy a greater degree of personal freedom.

Caramore provides the job and a great place to live first, and surrounds it with intensive support and treatment coordination to ensure your success.

D. Cooley

Caramore's mission

Caramore’s mission—written at the top right of this page—is to aid those suffering from psychiatric diseases.

Our mission and services are centered on providing a response to mental illness. This blog has stated our medical, rehabilitative, and ongoing illness management responses to the illness—responses that are at the same time scientific, ethical, and practical.

But there is another vital response needed—that of battling stigma. Slow realization, agreement, and acceptance of all that can go wrong with the complex brain; and the natural bewilderment of trying to understand distorted behavior altered by brain diseases, add up to a society that at best doesn’t understand, and at worst feels extreme discomfort.

Certainly the illness deserves anxiety—considering that we’re all vulnerable to depression and anxiety just as we are to heart disease and cancer. As we pass from youth into adulthood, limits to our healthy functioning begin to make themselves known. Our own imperfections, misfortunes, and limited suffering awake in us the realization that many others are suffering.

And to have a mental illness is to suffer—as millions do. But then to be marginalized and shunned by a confused and uncomfortable society, simply for having a hereditary illness—well, it doesn’t get any worse than that.

Caramore’s response to this is to be an organization based on inclusion. We believe that the most important first step in reversing society’s uneasiness—is to show them how easy it is. Caramore’s “community” is one in which having a mental illness does not mean exclusion or limitation. We seek to embrace, incorporate and include. Through camaraderie, relationships, expectations, and opportunity, we seek to not only pull people out of a debilitating illness, but show the obvious: we’re dealing with ordinary yet capable people who have a treatable disease.

A growing number of our clients—because of performance, attitude and effort—go on to work for us in permanent positions. These merit-based achievements we talk up precisely because we believe they are an example of our mission—to change society’s perception of mental illness.
D.Cooley

Study: Drugs don’t help enough

An article in today’s News & Observer says that for mental illness, drug therapy is not enough. It needs to “be accompanied by intensive support, including family counseling, vocational training and regular contact with doctors and other professionals."

Caramore has been providing the response needed for mental illness—and we’ve been doing it for 30 years. Here are the three responses that severe mental illness demands:

1. Medical Care. All forms of serious psychiatric disorders and diseases require ongoing medical treatment.

Caramore serves as a liaison between our clients and psychiatrists, therapists and pharmacists. We monitor all medication to ensure all prescribed medical treatment and therapies are being followed.

2. Supportive Environment. In severe cases—like schizophrenia—where cognition and behavior and insight have been impaired; rehabilitation is required. It can take a long time to relearn, readjust, and regain normal functioning. A structured environment that’s normalized, full of routines, expectations, and social interaction, is vital.

Caramore provides a rehabilitative setting that is supportive and encourages and requires direct effort and participation—the goal being to re-establish a meaningful life in our community.

3. Ongoing Illness Management. There is no immediate cure for hereditary psychiatric disorders. The illness can, and often does, return in degrees. But the chances of re-hospitalization can be reduced. Ongoing illness management entails living a healthy lifestyle, continued medical treatment, and remaining associated with support—support that helps limit isolation, ensure that the prescribed and correct (and often complex) medication regimen is being followed, and providing assistance in preventing small everyday life-problems from becoming large and un-repairable (like losing an apartment or a job).

Caramore offers long-term association with us that entails housing, medication management, psychiatric care coordination, along with employment, financial, and health care counsel. We work hard to ensure progress is continually gained and not lost during unfortunate twists and turns of the illness.

Who is the “typical” Caramore client?

The typical client is someone who has had a grievous progression from a normal life into the despair and turmoil of psychosis. Not only has their behavior and identity and reason become alien to them, but their family often suffers equally from fright, confusion, and pain.

The vast majority of mental illnesses are treatable and manageable. Caramore maintains that with medical treatment, our rehabilitative setting, and ongoing illness management, individuals can reach a high level of progress.

Frustratingly, it is the client—with impaired insight—who frequently struggles for years before coming to the realization that the illness is much more than they are and that it demands treatment and a life built around being conscious of that demand.

Caramore clients who buy into the program and are cooperative and are willing to work hard currently enjoy a near perfect success rate.

Most of our clients work part time. Part time is appropriate; the illness is not gone—it’s simply being treated and managed. Part time is less stress, less exhaustive. Part time allows the time for medical appointments and therapy. Part time allows for the continuance of Social Security. Part time is perfect for gradual recovery.

Our typical client works part time, receives Social Security, lives in our long-term program called Tier 3, enjoys our vibrant social setting, is trying to get better, and is always preparing and planning for the future.

D. Cooley

Caramore’s rehabilitation is centered on working

The only thing larger than our families in our lives is work. For the vast majority of us, freedom and self-determination are contingent on our ability to contribute—through creativity, skills, education, and determination—our labor to society. Most individuals who suffer from a severe psychiatric disease can still work, although usually at greatly reduced hours.

Caramore is centered on work because we’ve seen—for thirty years—that individuals with mental illness respond well to work. Work typically awards them with a feeling of meaning and self-mastery, which is a powerful coping mechanism. They feel “normal” again—a regular member of society who works for a living (and creates economic value).

Caramore’s work-based rehabilitation not only functions as a methodical framework to begin recovery of one’s life from illness; but in addition, we facilitate valuable soft skills such as punctuality, dress, work-place etiquette, conscientiousness, and more. Caramore works hard to make sure these skills “stick.”

Caramore produces individuals who have significantly mastered managing their illness, and highly competent, assured, and mindful employees.

D.Cooley