IPS Support Employment: A 20-Year Update

Over the past 20 years, individual placement and support (IPS) supported employment has emerged as an effective approach for helping people with severe mental illness find and succeed in competitive jobs. The IPS model has been validated by 15 randomized controlled trials as well as numerous nonexperimental studies in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong (Bond, Drake, & Becker, in press). IPS incorporates client-centered choices and goals as well as eight evidence-based principles, and approximately two thirds of IPS participants have some success in competitive employment (Bond, 2004). Because of the optimism inspired by these outcomes, researchers inmany countries are expanding the horizons of IPS, seeking to improve the model, reaching out to new populations, and tackling difficult policy issues. This special section can address only a fewof the current research initiatives. In this brief update, we preview the six papers in this issue and also survey the field more broadly, identifying a number of promising research areas.