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NYS OMH ACT Teams Utilize Harm Reduction Techniques
Harm Reduction can be a useful tool to help address potentially risky, dangerous, or self-destructive behaviors, including drug addiction, unsafe sexual activities, self-harm, and binge eating. The goal of harm reduction is to make dangerous behaviors safer, and to reduce the level of harmful...
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Compassionate Care for Substance Users in Traditional Settings
Like many other mental health treatments, substance use treatment has struggled with high dropout rates and problems with engaging clients. Only 0.9 percent of people who have some substance use issues engage in treatment. While some of this may be the client’s internal reluctance to get care,...
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Through Health Care System Integration
In many communities, harm reduction programs have helped prevent overdoses, lower HIV risk and hepatitis transmission and open the door to treatment for substance users. Originally started in the late 1980s, harm reduction approaches introduced syringe exchange initiatives with the goal of reducing...
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Harm Reduction: Theory and Practice
If we want to reduce the harm that derives from psychoactive substances, we need to begin by ending two ineffective, enduring and hugely expensive policies and practices in this country. Then we can get to true harm reduction. The first are strategies that seek to control access to and...
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CoveCare and MHA Putnam Team up to Provide Continuity and Services
CoveCare Center and the Mental Health Association in Putnam (MHA) have formed an affiliation that will leverage the strengths of both organizations in order to continue and grow the robust mental health services available to residents of Putnam and neighboring counties. Through this partnership,...
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Legalization of Drugs: The Ultimate Harm Reduction Measure
Illegal drugs are dangerous, but many of their dangers are caused by their illegality rather than the drugs themselves. Yes, the use of illegal (and some legal) drugs results in addiction. But if we really want to reduce the dangers of drug abuse, we must address its illegality as well as the...
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Finding the Right Recovery Path: Welcoming Everyone into Treatment
This nation is in an epidemic. There are no two ways about it. By now you have undoubtedly heard that more people died of overdose in New York State in 2016 than died of motor vehicle accidents, homicide and suicide, combined. In responding to this crisis, we do not have the luxury of closing our...
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Why Not Harm Reduction for Problem Gambling?
Harmful gambling is a public health issue. As types of gambling products and accessibility to gambling have increased, so too have concerns as to the harm associated with this behavior. While there is evidence of the harm cause by some forms of land-based gambling such as electronic gambling...
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Self-Reflections on Self-Determination in Harm Reduction
When I was a social work student in the early 1960s, I assumed that it was imperative, even obligatory, that I respect the right of client self-determination, but I certainly didn’t know how to put self-determination into practice. I was placed at Henry Street Settlement and worked with two...
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Our Realizations and Truths About Harm Reduction
Looking around the room in our focus group, we all realized two really interesting things about who we are and where we’ve been. Number one, that none of us were kids anymore, which is a nice way of saying that most of us already crossed the threshold of mid-life and were heading somewhere on the...
