Creative, flexible, and adaptive

Caramore has the honor or serving extremely unique and rare individuals. Illness is experienced and manifests itself very differently in each individual, making meeting people who come to Caramore a new adventure each time.

Experiences of mood disorders and psychotic diseases are traumatic and tragic—but they also can be fascinating, unimaginable, and humbling. The struggle to overcome illness is heroic and inspirational to be a part of.

It truly takes a team to take on this illness—and time. Treating it requires being creative, flexible, and adaptive. No one approach is always appropriate—each individual is frustratingly one-of-a-kind; but that’s also the challenge and source of satisfaction. Each individual necessitates being known within the context of who they are and what they need, and getting to know them is part of the fun.

How do you re-teach someone every little messy and complicated life-circumstance that the rest of us take for granted? It’s no science, and it begins simply enough with being kind and listening. It takes an open mind and a willingness to approach each person as needing something wildly different from the last one—and the reward for that openness is gaining a new friend.

D. Cooley

Police Crisis Intervention Teams

NAMI has been doing a wonderful job advocating for Police Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT) to be adopted in all communities.

What is a CIT program?

-CIT is a partnership between the police, the mental health system, family members and individuals suffering from mental illness.
Certain officers within a force who have an interest and insight into psychiatric illnesses, receive specialized training from mental health professionals and advocates .

-They are taught to recognize psychiatric distress and symptoms that accompany the disease, and the types of techniques and responses that best work to de-escalate the situation rather than compound it.
The goal, through recognizing psychotic symptoms and dealing with them appropriately, is to get the individual into the proper mental health treatment rather than arresting them or anyone getting hurt.

-Implemented in communities (Memphis, Durham, and many more), the program greatly reduces the rates of arrests and injuries for those with mental illness; and it improves the understanding and compassion and satisfaction for officers working within those communities.

The existence of this program is an encouraging example of the gradual progression of societal awareness concerning psychiatric brain diseases, its symptoms, and how best to help someone suffering from them.

D. Cooley

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.