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Percentage of Overdose Deaths Involving Methadone Declined Between January 2019 and August 2021
National data indicate COVID-era treatment expansion was not associated with harms, add evidence to support take-home treatment for opioid use disorder The percentage of methadone-involved overdose deaths relative to all drug overdose deaths declined from January 2019 to August 2021, according...
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Marijuana and Hallucinogen Use Among Young Adults Reached All-Time High in 2021
Marijuana and hallucinogen use in the past year reported by young adults 19 to 30 years old increased significantly in 2021 compared to five and 10 years ago, reaching historic highs in this age group since 1988, according to the Monitoring the Future (MTF) panel study. Rates of past-month nicotine...
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Another Call for Quality Improvement
Twelve years ago, Dr. Anthony Weiss and I presented a paper to the Healthcare Division of the American Society for Quality. We made a call for quality improvement in behavioral health and argued that, in general, what passed for quality improvement was really about compliance. We were echoing a...
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Employee Mental Health Benefits in the Private Sector: Workplace Programs and Hiring Policies
According to a recent study by Mental Health America, about fifty million Americans are experiencing some kind of mental illness. Each year, major depression affects more than 8% of about twenty-one million American adults. No matter a person's origin, age, status, line of work, or other personal...
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Better Together: Addressing Challenges by Working Together
Positive growth as a result of navigating challenges and building resilience is a basic tenet of the behavioral health care world. It’s the journey through which we support clients; it’s how clinicians and other staff flourish in their professions; and it’s how we, as organizations,...
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45 Years Within Human Services – Reflections and Where We Go From Here
I have had the privilege of working within the field of autism over the past 45 years. For 24 of those years, I have been honored to work at Melmark, a multi-state human service provider with premier private special education schools, professional development, training, and research centers,...
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How Technology of the Future is Solving Treatment Centers’ Challenges of the Past
Mental health and addiction service providers encounter struggles every day, whether it’s a challenge facing a patient or confronting the stigma surrounding the value of addiction rehabilitation. There are institutional obstacles including rising costs with stagnated administrational support....
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Mental Health in America: Looking Back With Pride and Ahead With Hope
In the early 1970s at the height of deinstitutionalization in New York, I worked at a psychiatric rehabilitation program on the West Side of Manhattan that primarily served people who had been in state psychiatric hospitals for 5, 10, 20, even 40 years. Each week I went to Manhattan State Hospital...
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50-Year-Old Organization Reflects on Its Achievements and Hopes for the Future
Federation of Organizations is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its incorporation as a not-for-profit by the parents of people with serious mental illness and/or developmental disabilities. Fifty years ago, these parents dreamed of changing the system. That has certainly come true! We can see...
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Updating Mental or Behavioral Health Language and Design to a Modern Healthcare Approach
More and more today, mental health care is accepted as an optimal course of action for millions of people. Those seeking care anticipate restorative outcomes. As recently as thirty years ago, mental health institutions were referred to in derogatory terms. Many of these secure institutional...
