Mental Health Skill Building FAQ

What are Mental Health Skill-building Services?

This program offers goal-directed training to enable individuals to achieve and maintain community stability and independence in the most appropriate, least restrictive environment.

How do Mental Health Skill-building Services work?

Services are typically provided in one-hour increments in the individual’s home or in the community and are tailored to his/her needs. Services are developed in coordination with the individual and services team using a person-centered approach. Individual recovery and support goals are developed to empower the individual to achieve objectives based on preferences, strengths, and potential.

Who may benefit from these services?

Individuals must demonstrate a clinical need for this service, which arises from a condition due to mental, behavioral, or emotional illness and results in significant impairments to major life activities.

To be eligible for services, the individual must:

• Have a serious mental illness;
• Require individualized training to acquire basic living skills, which could include symptom management, adherence to medication regimen, development and appropriate use of social skills and personal support system, personal hygiene, food preparation, or money management;
• Have a history including psychiatric hospitalization, residential crisis stabilization, Intensive Community Treatment (ICT) or Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT), placement in a psychiatric residential facility or Temporary Detention Order; and
• Have a prescription for anti-psychotic, mood stabilizing, or antidepressant medications within the 12 months prior to assessment.

Individuals eligible for this service may have a dual diagnosis of mental illness and developmental disability or mental illness and substance use disorder.  If an individual has co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, integrated treatment for the substance use condition will be used to positively impact the mental health condition.

What services are provided in the Mental Health Skill-building Services program?

Services include goal-directed training in functional skills and appropriate behavior related to an individual’s health and safety; activities of daily living and use of community resources; assistance with medication management; and monitoring health nutrition and physical condition.

Mental Health Skill-building Services (MHSS) is the new name for Mental Health Support Services (MHSS). The name change reflects that MHSS is a training service — not a mental health outpatient service, a preventative service, or a crisis service.