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Sustainability for Systems of Care
When Orange County, NY received a “System of Care” grant in October 2008, our community set out on a collaborative and ambitious journey to transform the way we care for youth with serious mental health challenges, and their families. Since 1993, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services...
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One Agency’s (and the System’s) Pathway to Recovery
Here’s a prescription for how to approach treatment of people with schizophrenia: “mental illness can be alleviated if the person is treated in a considerate manner, if he has the opportunity to talk about his trouble, if his interest is stimulated and if he is kept actively involved in...
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Point of View – Schizophrenia, The Mortality Gap, and Suicide
People with serious mental illness have a much lower life expectancy than the general population; estimates range from 9 to 32 years. Recent recognition of this mortality gap has led to increasing efforts to improve the health of these people by improving their access to health care and by...
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Providing a Second Chance for People with Schizophrenia
Despite advances in psychopharmacology, many individuals with schizophrenia remain too impaired to be discharged from the state hospitals. One response to this problem in New York State was the establishment of a unique partnership among a private hospital, the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Payne...
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Research Project to Test Approaches to Altering the Course of Schizophrenia
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is launching a large-scale research project to explore whether using early and aggressive treatment, individually targeted and integrating a variety of different therapeutic approaches, will reduce the symptoms and prevent the gradual deterioration of...
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Schizophrenia Management as Part of Home Health Care
The World Health Organization has identified schizophrenia as one of the ten most debilitating diseases affecting human beings. Schizophrenia is comprised of several symptoms. Symptoms of this illness can also be found in other mental illnesses. However, when “the symptoms of schizophrenia...
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Schizophrenia: Current Research and Treatment
Ways of Looking at Schizophrenia “I was of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.” Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird It’s an interesting time, to look back and look forward, at the state of psychiatric practice in the treatment of...
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Schizophrenia Linked to Over-expression of Gene in Fetal Brain
A gene called DISC1, (for “disrupted in schizophrenia”) has been a leading contender among possible genetic causes since it was implicated in schizophrenia in a large Scottish clan two decades ago. The DISC1 gene codes for a protein important for brain development, as well as for mood and...
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Social Security: Dispelling the Myths
Very often in the human services field we encounter people who want to help but just are not equipped. Their desire to make a difference in another’s life or situation prompts them to pass on bits of information that they themselves have learned, experienced or heard. As often happens in the...
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Subjects or Saviors: The Rules and Regulations Surrounding Human Clinical Trials of Experimental Psychiatric Medication
In opening his opinion striking down the Office of Mental Health’s regulations controlling the administration of experimental psychiatric medications to patients who lack the capacity to make decisions for themselves, Justice Edward J. Greenfield of the New York Supreme Court poignantly...
