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Designing Integrated Services for Adolescents: One Agency’s Experience
Addressing the mental health needs of teens in a clinic setting offers a unique set of challenges. Adolescent clients can strain the assumptions and framework of traditional mental health services in a number of ways: they have a developmental imperative to separate from parents and adult...
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Transforming Service Delivery Systems, Organizational and Administrative Structures
In looking at organizational infrastructures and the challenges involved in bringing about antiracist change, we invited leaders of not-for profit health and human service organizations to describe their experiences, and share what they have learned about what is required for transforming...
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The Impact of Race and Racism on Mental Health Clients, Practitioners, Organizations, and Delivery Systems – Crossing the Racial Rubicon
Race is the Rubicon we have never crossed in this country. Some claim that race is no longer a factor in the United States. We are “beyond racism.” The opposite is actually the case. Everything in this country is touched by race, from where we live or choose to live, go to school or send our...
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The Economics of Recovery: Who’s Driving the Bus?
There appears to be an incredible variety of people guiding our journey of recovery; elected and career government officials, all manner of professionals, academics, health insurers, providers, family, labor unions, big pharma, etc. If recovery takes a village – then it seems they all made it on...
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Achieving Services Children Deserve
Every young person is fully prepared for adulthood, with a supportive family and community, an effective school environment as well as high quality healthcare. According to the New York State Office of Mental Health 2008 Children’s Mental Health Plan is introduced with the above strategy...
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Point of View – Looking Back with Pride: Mental Health Policy in the 2nd Half of the 20th Century
I have had the good fortune over most of the past two decades to participate in the vast effort made by the Mental Health Association movement to make life better for people with mental illness, especially those who are disabled and rejected by society. There are two tremendously important...
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Is Mental Health Keeping Pace with Applications of Technology?
Henry Ford was once quoted as saying, “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The world has seen advances in communications that few could have imagined only fifty years ago. Since the invention of the worldwide web in 1973, there has been a virtual...
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Assessing Racial Equity Impact in Mental Health Policymaking: Reflections and Recommendations
Racism has a long and unique history in the practice and policy of mental health in the United States. In colonial times, for example, it was a common belief that Blacks did not have the intellectual capacity to experience mental illness. In later periods runaway slaves were diagnosed with...
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Building a Race Conscious Research Agenda
People of color have held a long and often damaging relationship with mental health researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Throughout the colonized history of the United States, the mental health of Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Latinos, Pacific Islanders, and other groups of color...
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Noted Panelists Discuss the Impact of Race and Racism on the Mental Health Professions and on the Therapeutic Alliance
Moderator’s Note: I had the pleasure of assembling a panel to address the impact of race and racism on the mental health professions. All of the panelists had participated in the Undoing Racism Workshop training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and were familiar with...
