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Early Childhood Mental Health Clinic: Unmasking Social-Emotional Needs in Young Children
Think about this: a child who turned 5 years old in March 2022 will have spent 60% of their young life in the age of COVID. Most, if not all, of the child's active memories will be a time when traveling outside the home means wearing a mask. They were told that masks keep them safe; masks protect...
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The Integration of Treatment and Recovery: Special Considerations for Working with Children
Historically, the term “recovery” was commonly associated with substance use/addiction services and was popularized in the United States through Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) (Witkiewitz, K., et al., 2020). Beginning in 1939, AA published materials highlighting recovery as a personal journey toward...
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Context Counts in Caring for Chemically Dependent Kids and Families
Despite feeling blindsided, many of us now know that we are living in the midst of an unprecedented drug epidemic. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, since 1999, the rate of overdose deaths including prescription pain relievers, heroin and synthetic opioids such as...
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Essentials for Working with Teenagers in Groups
As we transition into a changing system of care, it is essential that we do not lose sight of fundamental practice skills such as tuning-in, engaging and contracting with teens and their families. Nowhere is this more critical than working with teens in groups. Group work cannot simply be a...
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Consumer Perspectives: Advocates, Supporters, Parents
Services for the UnderServed partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness – New York City (NAMI-NYC) for this special edition of this column. This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on...
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Building Workforce Capacity to Support the Mental Health Needs of Young Children and Their Families
New York City is supporting its youngest children’s early development and their families through an innovative training partnership and network, funded by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) as part of ThriveNYC. The Early Childhood Mental Health Network, which...
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System Change and Service Providers: Opportunities and Challenges in Addressing Unmet Needs
In 2011, a priority of New York’s Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was Medicaid redesign, with the substantive presence of behavioral health services in both the Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) and the subsequent Delivery System Reform Incentive Program (DSRIP). The focus was to reduce inpatient...
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The Children’s Psychiatric Symptom Rating Scale (CPSRS)
The Children’s Psychiatric Symptom Rating Scale (CPSRS) is a tool designed to help investigators capture the judgments of clinicians and use them to improve the quality of patient care. For years Four Winds has used rating scales to capture therapists’ judgments regarding the nature and...
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To Improve Adolescent Mental Health, We May Need to Address Adverse World Events
It appears that the prevalence of mental disorders among adolescents has been increasing. The National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows an increase in major depressive episodes.1 A study about children and adolescence who are eligible for SSI by virtue of mental disabilities found an...
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Collaborating to Improve Children’s Health Care: The Time is Now
In 2015, New York State’s Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) issued a “Roadmap for Medicaid Payment Reform” that laid out a path for dramatic and innovative change in the way the state financed and administered healthcare. Initially, MRT took on a volume-based approach to health care through the...
