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Suicide Prevention: Creating an Agency-Wide Response
FEGS Health & Human Services, a large and diverse organization serving 100,000 individuals annually, provides a full array of behavioral services through community-based treatment, rehabilitation, care coordination programs and residential and housing services to over 25,000 people a year. We...
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Promoting Integrative Behavioral Healthcare: Gradualism and the Mechanisms of Change
The behavioral healthcare field is currently going through a period of transition – a time of increasing emphasis on the use of integrative approaches in the treatment of substance use and mental health problems. This change is not only being driven by economic necessity, but also by innovations...
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Preventing Mental Illnesses and Substance Use Disorders
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has a unique mandate in our City to prevent illness and disability. How does this mandate translate to our work in behavioral health? This inaugural publication of Behavioral Health News, with its focus on the interconnectedness...
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Scan Predicts Whether Therapy or Meds Will Best Lift Depression
Pre-treatment scans of brain activity predicted whether depressed patients would best achieve remission with an antidepressant medication or psychotherapy, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. “Our goal is to develop reliable biomarkers that match an individual patient to the...
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Outdated Perspective, Says Who? Therapeutic Work Programs with Land and Animals
In 1870 the Quakers’ Friends Hospital used greenhouses and acres of its natural landscape as integral parts of treatment for the mentally ill. At the turn of the century, Frederick Peterson, a neurologist and head of the New York State Board of Lunacy, did the same with a state asylum. Both the...
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Merging Legal, Clinical and Medical Issues for the Most Effective Treatment Outcomes
Drug courts began in Miami-Dade County Florida started a maverick program to combine rehabilitative substance abuse treatment within the justice system sanctions. Since that time, 2,743 drug courts have been developed across the country. This was a progressive initiative that has proven to be...
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Integrating Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Co-Occurring Disorder Treatment at Four Winds Hospital
Four Winds continues to be a leader in mental health care as we are now well into our fifth year of applying Dialectical Behavior Therapy to our Co-Occurring Disorder treatment. The Co-Occurring Track, one of two treatment tracks in our Adult Inpatient Program, offers a structured program for...
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Intentional Peer Support: Using a Crisis as an Opportunity for Growth and Change
In January 2013, Community Access, in partnership with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, launched the first alternative to hospitalization program in New York City. Called a crisis respite center, the new program has several unique features that, compared to “treatment as usual,”...
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It’s About Time
Back in the height of what was called the “Humane Care” period, state hospital institutions took care, to the limits of their abilities, of the full spectrum of people’s needs. While one can certainly look back and question the quality of the care and the enormous personal consequences of...
