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Substance Use Disorders: Frequency and Treatment for People with Serious Mental Illness
Throughout its history, America has attempted to punish substance users as a means to encourage their abstinence. These attempts have included imprisonment, fines, and forced rehabilitation programs, often sentenced at a higher rate to people of color (Volkow, 2023). Punishments like these often...
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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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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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Associative Stigma: An Unseen Force Impacting Mental Health Professionals and Service Users
Stigma toward people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses is a powerful force with pervasive impacts, some of which operate in subtle ways. In explaining the broad-reaching effects of stigma, Goffman (1963) asserted that persons who are “related through the social structure to a stigmatized...
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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...
