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Time to Start Talking About Pre-Addiction
By the time someone reaches out for addiction care, they may have already suffered numerous painful losses in their lives. Addiction can steal a person’s happiness, job, friends and family, and can erode their freedom. Far too often, the expectation is that someone must hit “rock...
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Early Mental Health Screening and Intervention Could Halt Addiction Epidemic
The epidemic of substance use disorder (SUD) has become a plague on our society, resulting in countless deaths, overwhelming our health care and justice systems, and taking a terrible toll on the families of those suffering from this disease. While billions of dollars have been poured into...
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OnTrackNY: An Early Intervention Program to Interrupt Psychosis
A year ago, 21-year-old Christine* started hearing voices saying terrible things about her. She wondered “why doesn’t anyone around me admit to hearing them?” And now people have started to spy on her, through her phone. Her parents were upset that she wasn’t able to contribute to the...
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Community Capacity: Can We Deliver Better Treatment for Children and Families?
On October 15, 2011, the Behavioral Health Subcommittee of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) gave its final report. For the adult behavioral health system, the report recommended an unprecedented investment into the housing needs of individuals with mental health and...
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Transformations at MHA Westchester: Children’s Services
In a recent edition of Behavioral Health News, The Mental Health Association of Westchester wrote of sweeping transformations in process throughout our agency, with a specific focus on services for adults. In this edition, we describe the transformations occurring throughout our services for...
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The Changing Landscape of Children’s Behavioral Health in New York: Opportunities for Addiction Services
New York State has been engaged in an effort to re-design its Medicaid program to better meet the needs of the people it covers while managing costs more effectively. The goals have been to increase access, develop new services, improve outcomes and reduce use of expensive hospitalizations. As the...
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Medicaid Redesign Will Help Children and Families Get the Right Services at the Right Time
New York State embarked on a large-scale effort in 2011 to restructure the State’s Medicaid program based on recommendations from the Governor-appointed Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT). The MRT was comprised of a wide variety of stakeholders, including State agencies, providers, advocates, consumers...
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Identifying and Managing Anxiety and Worry In Children and Adolescents
Many children and adolescents struggle with anxiety and worry. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), based upon the National Comorbidity Survey-Adolescent Supplement, 31.9% of adolescents aged 13-18 were identified as having an anxiety disorder with 8.3% of those individuals...
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Turn and Face the Change: Children’s Medicaid Redesign
Change is inevitable. Change has and will always be a part of life, but it seems that the last couple of decades have brought about an unprecedented rate and scale of change in our society. Technology, of course, can be identified as a driving factor and has radically transformed every aspect of...
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Spotlight on Research: An Interview with Jeffrey Borenstein, MD President and CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
What does the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation do? The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation is the largest non-governmental funder of mental health research grants in the world. The Foundation funds the most innovative ideas in psychiatry and neuroscience to better understand the...
