U.VA. SCHOOL OF NURSING RECEIVES GRANT
TO IMPROVE MENTAL HEALTH CARE FOR RURAL RESIDENTS 

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., April 24 -- The University of Virginia
School of Nursing has been awarded a $104,000 grant to improve mental
health services for rural central Virginians facing isolation,
loneliness and depression.
	Thanks to funding from the Virginia Health Care Foundation
(VHCF), U.Va. has formed a partnership with Central Virginia Health
Services (CVHS) to establish a clinic to provide treatment for rural
patients with depression or anxiety.  About 21 percent of patients
seen at CVHS, located in Buckingham County, require mental health
services. The new clinic will open at the CVHS site in June.
	Emily J. Hauenstein, senior researcher at CVHS and associate
professor of nursing at U.Va, and Dr. Randall T. Bashore, medical
director at CVHS, have researched mental health issues in rural
Virginia since the 1980s.  Hauenstein's work has focused on rural
premenopausal women whose needs are not met by existing community
health centers.  She has developed a full scale program for treating
major depressive disorders. 
	The additional funding from the Richmond-based foundation will
enable the CVHS center to serve groups other than premenopausal women,
including the elderly, men and children. "We will continue to treat
indigent women on a broader basis as we implement the Women's
Affective Illness Treatment program (WAIT)," said Hauenstein.  WAIT
attempts to meet the mental health needs of rural women who receive
their health care from at federally funded community health centers
such as CVHS. 
	Hauenstein and Bashore found that 45 percent of the women aged
18 to 55 in their studies experienced an extremely high prevalence of
major depressive disorders.  Major depressive disorder is a recurrent,
debilitating illness characterized by depression over a two-week
period. 
	"There is a direct link between gender, poverty and
depression," Hauenstein said. "Some clinic patients work several
unskilled part-time jobs, usually with no benefits, and travel an hour
each way to Richmond or Charlottesville while receiving little support
with daily tasks from family members. These factors often lead to
stress, which in turn, leads to depression."
	Patients come to CVHS from the counties of Albemarle,
Buckingham, Brunswick, Charlotte, Cumberland and Prince Edward, where
rural unemployment rates are high.  Many residents are descendants of
slaves or sharecroppers and continue to live in an agrarian society
that was built during the 1800s. Nearly 50 percent of the patients are
African Americans.
	Uninsured residents, many of whom are the working poor, may
not receive adequate services at mental health centers located within
an hour's drive of Buckingham because funding is only available for
the chronically mentally ill, the mentally retarded, youth services
and crisis intervention, said Hauenstein.  Patients with nonchronic,
episodic disorders including major depressive disorders, are in need
of intermittent intervention with a range of intensity of services.
These services are unavailable in local community centers.
	"This is a critical problem, because patients with major
depressive disorders experience profound, but episodic bouts of
depression. When their symptoms worsen, they are less able to carry
out their daily responsibilities," said Hauenstein.
	VHCF funding will support the program for three years, after
which the Buckingham clinic will have to be sustained through revenues
and private and community support.
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April 23, 1997
	For additional information, call Emily J. Hauenstein at
U.Va.'s School of Nursing at (804) 924-0093 or Katherine Jackson in
U.Va. News Services at (804) 924-3629.  Television reporters should
contact our TV News Office at (804) 924-7550.