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The Changing Landscape of Children’s Behavioral Health in New York: Opportunities for Addiction Services
New York State has been engaged in an effort to re-design its Medicaid program to better meet the needs of the people it covers while managing costs more effectively. The goals have been to increase access, develop new services, improve outcomes and reduce use of expensive hospitalizations. As the...
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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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The NYSPA Report: Spotlight on OnTrackNY – New York’s First-Episode Psychosis Early Intervention Program
OnTrackNY is a coordinated specialty care program for adolescents and young adults who have started experiencing psychotic symptoms. Started in 2013, the program is a joint collaboration of the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH), the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), the...
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To Help Transition Age Youth and Young Adults Succeed: Focus on Their Education
While transition age youth and young adults ages 16 to 25 with serious mental health conditions (TAYYA) face many challenges and risk factors, not graduating from high school is possibly the single biggest one, predictive of multiple future problems including unemployment, homelessness, 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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Transformations at MHA Westchester: Children’s Services
In a recent edition of Behavioral Health News, The Mental Health Association of Westchester wrote of sweeping transformations in process throughout our agency, with a specific focus on services for adults. In this edition, we describe the transformations occurring throughout our services for...
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When and Where They Need It: Providing Community-Based Services to Families and Youth for Foundational Wellbeing
For community providers serving children and families in New York, there is a contemplative question our work presents to us like an ever-unfolding puzzle – how can we get young people to the services that will support their ability to live their best lives? Many creative strategies have been...
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Addressing the Growing Problem of School Refusal
Anxiety disorders have been plaguing America’s children to a significant degree and are now one of the most common behavior health disorders of today’s school age children. Anxiety, often in conjunction with depression, is found to be a key determinant of school refusal (historically diagnosed...
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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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Championing a Hidden Health Crisis: Childhood Sexual Trauma
The contemporary English writer, Julian Barnes once wrote “Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.” Sadly so, for many children those memories of childhood are not laced with adjectives such as happy, trusting, innocent, precocious, fresh, sensitive, fanciful,...
