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When Staff Burnout Prevents Progress
After nearly two years of facing COVID-19 waves and realities, healthcare workers are facing unprecedented levels of burnout. Providing important support, resources and space for staff can help prevent this and other acute stress responses from turning into longer term behavioral health...
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Serious Mental Illness Recovery: The Basics
When managing serious mental illness (SMI), the recovery journey can be long and challenging. It often requires creative and prolonged efforts to build and maintain a full life, but many people do reach recovery. In fact, up to 65% of people living with SMI experience partial to full recovery...
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Addressing the Needs of Frontline Workers
Throughout the past year, I have been struck by the degree to which attention to mental health and wellness, specifically of the impact of trauma on mental health, has entered mainstream discussion. “Frontline Workers” (FLW) who continued to show up for work despite personal risks have been...
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Post-COVID Strategies to Achieve the Trauma-Informed Behavioral Health System We’ve Needed All Along
For decades, systemic racism has disproportionately routed Black and Brown children who have unmet behavioral health needs to congregate care and residential programs, and adults with these needs, to jails and prisons (Bronson & Berzofsky, 2017; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2021)....
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A Trauma-Informed Community Approach to Bullying
As the largest mental health clinic provider in the South Bronx, New York Psychotherapy and Counseling Center (NYPCC) therapists have witnessed an influx of traumatized children struggling with bullying in city schools. Indeed, New York State Education Department statistics show that bullying is a...
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Integrating Trauma-Informed Care Into Organizations Serving Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities
In recent years, there has been a large focus on understanding how trauma interacts with other factors to create unique vulnerabilities in people. Individuals who have experienced intense or frequent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) exhibit more health and behavioral difficulties throughout...
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Trauma-Responsive Care: Beyond Mental Health
In a disaster, the psychological “footprint” greatly exceeds the size of the medical “footprint” (J.M. Shultz, 2010). While much of the United States is focused on “reopening” and going back to in-person work, school, and social activities, with images in the news of joyous reunions of...
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How the COVID-19 Pandemic Underscores the Need for Trauma-Informed Care
A traumatic experience can have long-lasting effects on a person’s physical, mental and emotional health and well-being for decades afterwards; and the more traumatic events a person experiences, the more likely they’ll have significant medical and emotional problems. For the past 18...
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988 Suicide Lifeline Expected in July 2022 Thanks to SAMHSA Grant
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) today announced Vibrant Emotional Health (Vibrant) will be the administrators of the new 988 dialing code for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Lifeline). A pair of the agency’s grants, totaling $48 million and...
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Secondary Traumatic Stress: A Key Piece of the Conversation
The personal impact of being in the helping profession never crossed my mind when I was in graduate school on my way to becoming a social worker. My focus was on gleaning what I could from my professors and building what I hoped would be the most complete set of clinical skills. I was unaware at...
