Substance Abuse Among Veterans: Challenges and Hope

Coping with the invisible wounds of war is the new front line for hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning from multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sleepless, on high alert, and waiting in fear for something terrible to happen, countless veterans turn to alcohol or drugs to try and...

The Evolution of Recovery-Oriented Services in NYC and at MHA-NYC

New York City has a long and proud history of providing a wide range of recovery-oriented programs for individuals with serious and persistent mental illness. Following in the activist path of Clifford Beers who started the modern mental health movement in 1909, six former psychiatric patients and...

PTSD Among Veterans: A Signature Wound that Desperately Needs Healing

Veterans returning to civilian life from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from tragically high rates of mental and substance use disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a hallmark injury among returning veterans, with a prevalence rate of approximately 20 percent—a rate two...

Riding the Wave of Health Care Reform

Addictions and risky use of addictive substances constitute one of the largest and most costly public health issues facing the nation, but addiction care has been vastly under-resourced and remains largely separate from mainstream medical and behavioral health care practice. Unrecognized and...

Saving Real Lives in Virtual Space: Innovative Suicide Prevention Solutions

The Facebook safety team sees messages like the following every day: “I’m going to kill myself this is my last post ever ill will miss u all…” 1 Since there are more than 37,000 deaths by suicide every year,2 and more than 50% of Americans have a Facebook profile,3 it’s not surprising...

Symptoms of Depression and the Role of Traumatic Brain Injury

An elementary school student displays uncooperative behavior, emotional outbursts, social difficulties and learning challenges, and is placed in special education. A young veteran, recently home from active duty, attempts to return to pre-deployment functioning, but is hampered by feelings of...

Meeting the Housing Needs of Young Adults with Behavioral Health Challenges

Imagine being 18 years old, or even 25, and having no place to call home. For a young person with few or ruptured ties to family and community, a roof overhead is simply not enough. A growing body of neuroscientific evidence confirms what we have long known intuitively, that brain development and...

Inequality in the Effects of Disaster Trauma in Women

Over the past decade, the U.S. has seen an increase in large scale disasters both man-made and natural, from 9-11-01, the Virginia Tech and the Fort Hood Shootings to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike. These events have the potential to create states of acute emotional distress in people who are...

Geriatric Mental Health in New York State: A Reflection on Progress and Future Directions

The first wave of the baby boom generation turns 65 this year. In New York State, the number of older adults will grow 50% over the next twenty years from 2.7 million in 2011 to 3.9 million in 2030. 20% of these individuals have diagnosable mental and/or substance use disorders. As a result of this...

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...