A Second Special Issue of Research on Mental Health Clubhouses

This second special issue on Fountain House mental health clubhouses completes our offerings on this well established form of collectivity that has many self-help/ mutual aid features. The research in these two issues has shown extensive similarity across Clubhouses in different countries as well as diversity in various welfare and cultural contexts. The similarity is partly due to the 36 international standards and the training of staff and members in these standards that define the model and which provide the opportunity for a specific Clubhouse to be named as such (see www.iccd.org). The diversity stems from the cultural interpretation of standards as well as restraining factors of the welfare context and civil society within specific countries. Magnus Karlsson, Guest Editor of these special issues, invited Thomas Craig, a senior psychiatrist familiar with the Clubhouse research from the UK to review the articles for the special issue, situate the Clubhouse as a social intervention to mitigate the effects of mental illness, and comment on how the research in these articles extends our knowledge on Clubhouses. Thomas Craig’s article titled “Expanding knowledge of peer-based mental health organizations: The experience of Clubhouse” is the lead article in this issue. His article and three others comprise this special issue on Clubhouses. Kimiko Tanaka reports the results of her qualitative look at how peer support is manifested for members through their participation in the work-ordered day in one Clubhouse in New York City. Francesca Pernice-Duca and her colleagues accomplish two aims: first, they show how the recently popularized concept of recovery from mental illness (defined in a consensus statement through a U.S.