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Moving Toward Recovery After Discharge with the Ongoing Abstinence Recovery Schedule Program™
Like many psychiatric hospitals, Montgomery County Emergency Service (MCES), located in Norristown, PA, serves adults with primary serious mental illness many of whom also have a co-occurring substance use disorder (COD), sometimes involving opiates. This “double trouble” puts them at greater...
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The Mental Health Association of Westchester’s Intensive and Sustained Engagement Team (INSET)
Anyone involved in the mental health system, whether an individual diagnosed with a behavioral health condition, family member, or practitioner of services, knows that there is pervasive stigma in our country concerning mental health. Although the COVID pandemic has brought increased attention to...
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Centering the Family: What It Means to Implement Family-Focused Practice (FFP) in Adult Mental Health Care
Providers have an important role and responsibility to engage families when patients have a psychiatric hospitalization. HIPAA is often used to deny patients' families access to critical information. By educating and engaging families along the way, we can significantly reduce patient readmission...
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Lee’s Traumatic Journey: A Therapeutic Story to Address Life-Threatening Behaviors with Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)
ECT remains a controversial topic within medicine and psychiatry, raising concerns about ethics and the right to effective treatment, the historical record of its clinical efficacy, the research with children, adolescents, and young adults with autism spectrum disorder and catatonia, and evidence...
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Care Transitions: A Critical Time to Prevent Suicides
The transition from inpatient psychiatric care to outpatient behavioral health treatment is fraught with elevated risk for people with histories of suicidality. According to the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention (Action Alliance), suicide rates are 300 times higher for individuals...
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From the Publisher: A Personal Journey From a Survivor of Suicide: “From the Depths of Despair to a Mission of Advocacy”
I was drifting in and out of consciousness in the emergency room. “You have to drink this,” someone was saying as they held a tall plastic cup to my lips, filled with a tasteless ink-black liquid. I later learned that the charcoal drink was given to me to absorb the toxic soup that was in my...
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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...
