Vision: Provide purpose and community for those with mental illness.

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Mission: Empowering people with mental illness to engage in meaningful, sustainable and transformative personal relationships and community partnerships.

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Mental illness touches nearly every family. Here in Casper, one in twenty-five adults (2,400) live with a significant mental illness. Many of these live life in isolation, as the effects of their illness, prompts many to experience broken familial relationships and strains in their work life.

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The Iris Clubhouse provides opportunities and resources for friendship, employment, housing and education in a caring and safe environment. Our members have the opportunity for recovery and can participate as valued and respected members of society. 

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In 2017 Iris House, Inc. was established.  We have received our 501(c)(3) designation, have a dedicated volunteer board, full support from the mental health community. We follow the Clubhouse Model of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, just as the 341 other Clubhouses throughout the world do.

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The goal of Iris Clubhouse is to save lives, remove barriers and build success stories for people with mental illness. We will do this through meaningful work, employment opportunities, education and access to effective services and supports.  

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A Clubhouse is a community of adults living with a severe and persistent mental illness who come together to work towards personal goals. The clubhouse is a work-oriented program that helps people to build their job skills, to regain personal worth and to rejoin our community.  Through this program, these individuals can lead rich and fulfilling lives, while at the same time reducing hospitalizations, incarcerations and the need for additional social services.

 

As one member of a Clubhouse put it, "The Clubhouse is for the mentally ill like physical therapy is for the physically ill. It builds up self-confidence like physical therapy builds up muscles." 

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The Clubhouse model was accepted for inclusion in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) National Registry of  Practices and Programs (NREPP) in 2011. In a study done at Thresholds Clubhouse program in Chicago, the rehospitalization rate for the treatment group after 9 months was 14% compared to a rate of 44% for a control group that used other services (Dincin & Witheridge,1982). 

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We have seen lower hospitalization and contacts with law enforcement for our members as participation in Clubhouse is proven to reduce recidivism rates for mentally ill offenders (Johnson and Hickey, 1999) and improves work-readiness.