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Finding the Perfect Fit with Peer Support: Navigating Employment with Mental Illness
Searching for the right job, or even any job, can be stressful for weeks, months, or even years. The challenges may not even stop after obtaining gainful employment. They can bleed into maintaining that job, which then shields us from engaging in the stressful job search process. These challenges...
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The Critical Role of Peer Support Programs to Sustained Substance Use Disorder Recovery
Many people who have used behavioral health services can attest to the profound benefits of connecting with someone with shared experience. Finding others with common lived experience - often referred to as peers - and learning about their challenges and resilience are particularly valuable for...
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The Mental Health Association of Westchester’s Intensive and Sustained Engagement Team (INSET)
Anyone involved in the mental health system, whether an individual diagnosed with a behavioral health condition, family member, or practitioner of services, knows that there is pervasive stigma in our country concerning mental health. Although the COVID pandemic has brought increased attention to...
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From Crisis to Recovery: The Role of Peer Support Specialists at NYC Well
In her foreword to Intimations, written on May 31, 2020, novelist Zadie Smith states that as a result of reading Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, she discovered “two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.” That she...
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Behavioral Health News Spotlight on Excellence – An Interview with Joseph Wilson, Peer Specialist with Services for the UnderServed
Overview David Minot, Executive Director of Mental Health News Education, the non-profit organization that publishes Behavioral Health News, interviews Joseph Wilson, a Certified Addiction Recovery Coach and Peer Specialist with Services for the UnderServed in NYC. Joseph details his work at the...
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Enhanced CRPA and CHW Training and Workforce Transformation
The Certified Recovery Peer Advocate (CRPA) and Community Health Worker (CHW) are two emerging workforce roles in health care. A CRPA is a person who uses lived experience with substance use disorder (SUD) and who have been certified to provide peer support services including non-clinical coaching,...
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Creating a Family Peer Support and Services Workforce
For the caregiver of a Medicaid-eligible child who has a behavioral diagnosis, or demonstrated loss of a physical health diagnosis, Children & Family Support & Services (CFTSS) provide unprecedented support, advocacy and resources. On July 1, 2019, the fourth CFTSS component, Family Peer...
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Adding Recovery Professionals to the Continuum of Care
What is the purpose of our work, of all the prevention, intervention and therapy, all that merciful medical model and multi-volume DSM? The treatment plans? Aftercare? All this helping apparatus – what’s it for? Now, the agreed response is that “recovery” is our mutual goal irrespective...
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Integrating the Social and Cultural Determinants of Health into Peer Advocates Training
The phrase social and cultural determinants of health has entered the lexicon of medical and social service providers and is often mentioned alongside health disparities. Since the early 90s, public health researchers have been suggesting that a person’s socioeconomic characteristics, including...
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Organizational Needs-Based Toolkit for Peer Workforce Integration Introduced at NYC Peer Workforce Consortium
On Thursday, April 18th, the NYC Peer and Community Health Worker Workforce Consortium convened over sixty stakeholders at CUNY Graduate School for Public Health for an event to “kick off” its new toolkit. The toolkit offers guidance to provider organizations who are interested in advancing the...
