SAR Professor Recognized for Work in Psychiatric Disabilities
SAR Professor Patricia Nemec receives USPRA’s John Beard Award for helping people with psychiatric disabilities.
Patricia Nemec, a Sargent College associate professor of occupational therapy and rehabilitation counseling, will receive the John Beard Award from the U.S. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association (USPRA) for her assistance to people with psychiatric disabilities, such as schizophrenia.
The award is named in memory of John Beard, who in 1948 founded New York’s Fountain House, a program that helps people with mental illness recover and reintegrate into society. It is presented each year to a USPRA member who has made “decisive, lasting and far-reaching advances in the field” of psychiatric rehabilitation.
Nemec, the third Boston University faculty member to have earned the John Beard award, is a licensed psychologist, a certified rehabilitation counselor, and psychiatric rehabilitation practitioner. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on psychiatric rehabilitation and has developed training curricula on the subject.
“I am touched by the support and recognition of the psychiatric rehabilitation community,” she says. “John Beard was a visionary in the field, whom I have long admired.”
Nemec credits what she has learned from others for her accomplishments. “I have learned much by working with my colleagues at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and the Rehabilitation Counseling Program,” she says. “But I have learned at least as much from the many courageous people I have known who have a psychiatric disability.”
Kathleen Dowling can be reached at dowlingk@bu.edu.