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The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation: A Personal Perspective
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is unraveling the many mysteries of mental illness, autism spectrum disorders, and many other diseases and disorders of the brain. I would like to thank Dr. Jeffery Borenstein and his team at BBRF for their help in bringing our salute to their...
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ICL Housing: Like a Nice Piece of CAKE
As the story goes, at ICL we’ve been saying for quite a while, that Housing is much more than just a bed, some clean sheets and case management services. At ICL we believe that Housing is far more complex and that at the very core of all of our Housing is hope and relationship building. Today,...
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The Right Support
Creating an atmosphere of inclusion and acceptance for all people coming to an organization for help begins with the core values of that agency. Here, at ICL, we believe in and offer person-centered, recovery-oriented, trauma-informed, and integrated physical and behavioral healthcare. No matter a...
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LGBTQ: A Community in Need of Effective Care
As the current heroin epidemic holds the nation in its grips, due in part to the over-prescription of opioid pain medications, there is another drug that continues to take its toll on the LGBTQ community: crystal methamphetamine. Crystal methamphetamine is not new to this community. According to...
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The Promise and Peril of Value Based Behavioral Health Care
By aligning payment with value, we can achieve the triple aim of better outcomes and better experience of the healthcare system at a lower cost IF we define value in terms of wellness, recovery and improved quality of life. In this case as with almost everything in our healthcare system today, the...
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Building a Quality Behavioral Health Workforce: Employing Service-User Perspectives Throughout Your Organization
With the introduction of Managed Behavioral Health Care in October of 2015 and the soon to be implemented Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), engagement of “peers” in the workforce has become a topic of considerable interest. HCBS introduces peer support as a Medicaid billable service...
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Effective Supervision: An Essential Component to Enhancing Consumer Outcomes
The behavioral healthcare industry is facing a monumental time of change. The mental health field in particular is faced with putting more responsibility on consumers to drive their own treatment. No longer, it seems, will a person with mental health challenges be cared for in a prescriptive, or...
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Increasing the Addiction Workforce: Fellowship Training in Addiction Medicine
Substance use is one of the most significant public health issues in the United States. Annual costs related to crime, lost work productivity and health care due to use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs exceeds $700 million annually (http://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics)....
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Coming to Grips with Substance Use Issues Among Employees’ Young Adult Dependents
The impact of substance use and mental illness on the workplace has been well documented. But how well do employers grasp what’s at stake when faced with employees whose adult dependents are grappling with a mental health or substance use issue? These employers are confronted with two...
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Supporting Peer Specialists
An increasingly common workforce issue is preparing “traditional” providers for working beside peer providers, that is, individuals with the lived experience of mental health issues. SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) defines a peer provider as “a person who...
