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Preventing Suicide: Addressing Trauma-Related Symptoms in Individuals with Serious Mental Illness
The incidence of mental illness is pervasive in the United States, a recent estimate suggesting it impacts more than one in five adults (NIMH, 2023). While “mental illness” is a category that embodies all diagnoses, a subset of this category, serious mental illness (i.e., schizophrenia spectrum...
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Understanding and Detecting the Signs of Serious Mental Illness and Suicidal Ideation
Serious mental illness and suicidal ideation are two of the largest problems in American healthcare today. In fact, while one-in-five American adults have any mental illness, approximately 1 in 20 adults in the U.S. are affected by serious mental illness, or a mental illness that significantly...
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Helping Families Cope with Serious Mental Illness: Maternal vs Social Work Instincts
I am a Social Worker. I am also a mom of an adult child with SMI, specifically bi-polar disorder. My child is 23 and I pray that she welcomes God into her life. That’s the mom in me talking. As a social worker, I want her to get a job, find a great partner who will love her, and become as...
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St. Francis Friends of the Poor’s Serious Mental Illness Programs in the Community
Picture this; you wake up on a therapeutic mattress and push aside your shades to catch a glimpse of the city’s hustle and bustle. Next, you reach into your mini fridge for a bottle of water and begin your day thereafter. You walk downstairs, locking your private room behind you, and check out...
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Addressing the Intersection between Severe Mental Illness and Homelessness
Services for the UnderServed (S:US) is one the largest community-based health and human services organizations in New York State that works intentionally daily to right societal imbalances by providing comprehensive and culturally responsive services. We provide services to people living with...
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WellLife Network’s Mental Health Residential Services: Creating Exceptional Living Experiences for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness
In today's world, individuals experiencing severe mental illness (SMI) face numerous challenges. Safe and nurturing residential services are crucial components for successful well-being, along with essential support structures necessary for recovery. WellLife Network's highly acclaimed housing...
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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...
