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Shattering the Silence of Selective Mutism
If you’ve ever worked with a student identified as being diagnosed with Selective Mutism, you might see how easy it is to understand why many assume that the student is willfully avoiding eye contact, conversation, or compliance. How can it be that the same child, who speaks so clearly and...
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Challenges of Black Males with Mental Illness
This entry is focused on the mental health issues among Black males and the challenge of dealing with race and racism in mental health agencies. Because of the extensiveness of need, combined with stereotyping that is perhaps unique to this population, and notable gaps in culturally appropriate...
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Building a Race Conscious Research Agenda
People of color have held a long and often damaging relationship with mental health researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Throughout the colonized history of the United States, the mental health of Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Latinos, Pacific Islanders, and other groups of color...
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Designing Integrated Services for Adolescents: One Agency’s Experience
Addressing the mental health needs of teens in a clinic setting offers a unique set of challenges. Adolescent clients can strain the assumptions and framework of traditional mental health services in a number of ways: they have a developmental imperative to separate from parents and adult...
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Clinical Reflections on the Impact of Race and Racism on the Counselor/Client Relationship
This article was prepared in collaboration with an interracial group of mental health providers practicing in a variety of public and private mental health settings. Each clinician has completed the PISAB Undoing Racism Workshop™ and does anti-racist organizing in their various settings. In...
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Point of View – Looking Back with Pride: Mental Health Policy in the 2nd Half of the 20th Century
I have had the good fortune over most of the past two decades to participate in the vast effort made by the Mental Health Association movement to make life better for people with mental illness, especially those who are disabled and rejected by society. There are two tremendously important...
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Is Mental Health Keeping Pace with Applications of Technology?
Henry Ford was once quoted as saying, “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The world has seen advances in communications that few could have imagined only fifty years ago. Since the invention of the worldwide web in 1973, there has been a virtual...
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Assessing Racial Equity Impact in Mental Health Policymaking: Reflections and Recommendations
Racism has a long and unique history in the practice and policy of mental health in the United States. In colonial times, for example, it was a common belief that Blacks did not have the intellectual capacity to experience mental illness. In later periods runaway slaves were diagnosed with...
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Achieving Services Children Deserve
Every young person is fully prepared for adulthood, with a supportive family and community, an effective school environment as well as high quality healthcare. According to the New York State Office of Mental Health 2008 Children’s Mental Health Plan is introduced with the above strategy...
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The Economics of Recovery: Who’s Driving the Bus?
There appears to be an incredible variety of people guiding our journey of recovery; elected and career government officials, all manner of professionals, academics, health insurers, providers, family, labor unions, big pharma, etc. If recovery takes a village – then it seems they all made it on...
