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...

Clinical Work with Transgender Individuals

The first step toward clinical work with any client involves understanding the individual, their reasons for seeking treatment, and the goals they hope to accomplish through therapy. It is important to remember that every client is unique regardless of the aspects that may be used to describe them,...

Supervision: Paying Attention to the Soul, Not the Technique

Although I’ve never been a psychoanalyst, I did spend a year in analysis and took classes at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute. I left at the end of a year because being in practice at that time I came to realize that my own style of work was much more realistic, confrontational and time...

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...

Medicating Mindfully: How Your Doctor Thinks

It’s been said that prescribing medication for our patients is as much art as science. Certainly, the science of psychopharmacology has exploded over the past three decades. Our understanding of how and where medications work has become identifiable and precise. Effects and side effects have been...

Kids Do Get Better: Values Driven Inpatient Care

In New York State, and across the country, the story of how mental health care began begins with inpatient care provided in large institutions located in a bucolic rural environment. This “humane treatment,” in its day, was considered a progressive avant-garde form of care. For decades this...

The Arc of Eating Disorders: Co-Morbid Diagnoses Contained Within

Eating disorders (Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, Binge Eating Disorder) are considered “umbrella disorders.” Typically, an eating disorder is part of a larger diagnostic picture. There is almost always a co-morbid diagnosis–depression, anxiety or personality disorder in addition to familial...