Why Every Community Needs a Clubhouse
Chief Operating Officer, Jack Yatsko, joined Connections House’s podcast, Connected, to discuss how Clubhouses help strengthen and create opportunities for individuals and communities. Click here to view and download the full transcript!
This year has seen remarkable growth of the Clubhouse International network. We have grown to 371 Clubhouses in 33 countries!
Transcript Excerpt: Why Do You Think that Every Community Needs a Clubhouse?
Brianna: Jack, why do you feel like every community should have a Clubhouse?
Jack: Well, I think I’ll answer that in two ways. One is in more of the words of members. We refer the people who come to the Clubhouse as members, not patients or clients because they’re members of a community and they’re involved in the day-to-day operations of the Clubhouse and I’ve been to over 200 Clubhouses.
To answer that question in the words of many and visiting over 200 Clubhouses, I constantly meet Clubhouse members who tell me, my Clubhouse not only changed my life, it saved my life. We take those words very seriously in our work and those words are why every community should have a Clubhouse because it changes lives and saves lives according to the testimonials of so many different members.
The other aspect of that is Clubhouses are a value add to any community. Think of Boys and Girls Clubs, senior centers, Rotary Clubs. Not everybody knows exactly what do they do at the Rotary Club or what’s the programmatic components of the Boys and Girls Club but people have a general idea that these are good things and they add value to the community. So too does Clubhouses add value to the community for adults who’ve experienced some mental illness.
In that vernacular, while people think of every community needing senior centers and well-respected organizations like that, I too feel like if every community had a Clubhouse, because every community has people with mental illness but not every community has a resource center such as this, there’s value added to that.
And we’ll dive into more of that. I think the piece about like a broader conversation around the space around mental health is that we need to think of this more than just the treatment. People think, okay, get medication and get therapy or supports like that.
Those are very valuable components of many people who’ve experienced a mental illness but more so than that is the rehabilitation piece of that. Like, how do you know if you’re a treating psychiatrist and you’re seeing somebody once a month in your prescribing medication, like how effective that really is if somebody doesn’t leave the house and go out into the community? My mom had a really bad anxiety problem and one of the ways of measuring that was could she get out of the house and interact with people?
If she’s just staying behind the four, the sanctity of the four walls of her house, that medication may be helpful to keeping her out of the hospital but is it really helping her or anybody else to get out the doors and go to the grocery store, go to the movies, to have a life? Right. And that’s what Clubhouses do.
So really Clubhouses are a bridge for people to reintegrate back into society. So we very much complement regular psychiatric treatment and other treatment components that are out there. So really it’s like say, I don’t know, another comparison might be if you have to get a knee replacement for example.
And so you get your knee replaced, the surgery is done, you get your knee replaced but if you don’t do the rehab and you don’t do the work and the exercise to get that functional, then that may not, you may not progress being able to use your new knee in the same way you did before. So same sort of thing with the psychiatric community, there’s so many much better medications, much worse, I mean much less of the worst side effects that sometimes came with older psychotropics.
That is really advancing which is a wonderful thing. But so too is the other rehab component. How is this really measuring and helping people with staying out of the hospital and reintegrating back into society through employment, school, housing and all those kinds of things. That’s what Clubhouse is the secret sauce of getting people back into their lives.
Much more is available! Click Here to Read the Full Transcript!