Emmy Tiderington Receives NIH Grant

Homeless adults with both psychiatric and substance use disorders are a highly vulnerable population that is expensive to care for due to repeated rounds of emergency room, hospital, shelter, and jail stays. Supportive housing, a community-based model of care, seeks to break this costly circuit by helping individuals meet housing and other needs.

Now, supportive housing services are being charged with implementing "recovery-oriented" practices — a shift from the traditional practitioner-driven biomedical model of care to a more collaborative, consumer-driven approach to services for individuals living with mental illness.

Emmy Tiderington, LMSW, a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor at the
 Silver School, has received an NIH F-31 training grant to study implementation of recovery-oriented practices in supportive housing programs. She brings to this project over a decade of experience as a service provider and clinical supervisor in housing and mental health services for people with serious mental illness.

In the first phase of the research, she will examine the real world barriers to recovery-oriented practices through in-depth interviews with front-line providers, as well as observations of organizational day-to-day operations. With this information, she will design a questionnaire to administer to both front-line and upper-level supervisory staff. It should yield a broader understanding of provider-perceived barriers to recovery-oriented practices in supportive housing.

Taken together, the findings will be used to inform the development of new or the tailoring of existing interventions to improve the implementation of recovery-oriented practices in this particular service setting.

Professor Deborah Padgett, Tiderington’s advisor, states, "As principal investigator of the New York Recovery Study and Tiderington’s advisor, I have had the pleasure of witnessing her transition from doctoral student to promising young scholar. Tiderington’s practice experience is especially valuable to the study as we learn about the work of front-line case managers. It is this work that will form the basis for her dissertation research supported by the F31 fellowship. In addition to her academic achievements, Tiderington brings energy, humor, and a strong commitment to social justice to everything she does."