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Access for All: Achieving Behavioral Health Equity in Healthcare
Health equity is a fundamental principle that aims to ensure that all individuals have an equal opportunity to achieve optimal health, regardless of their social or economic circumstances. Behavioral health equity refers to the fair and just distribution of behavioral health resources, supports,...
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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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Severe, Long-Term Mental Illness: What Does it Take to Live Well?
Typical images of people with severe, long-term mental illnesses are misleading. We think not of people who, despite mental illness, have lives that they find satisfying and meaningful but of homeless people dressed in rags pushing shopping carts with all their belongings and sleeping on heating...
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Bridging the Leadership Gap
Recent research has shown that our collective “mental model” and quest for the conventional white standard for a leader reduces the likelihood that BIPOC will be viewed as suitable for leadership roles. Lack of diversity at the top of organizations has often been attributed to the belief that...
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Improving Medication Adherence in People with Serious Mental Illness
Psychotropic medication nonadherence in populations with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) can lead to inadequate symptom control, reduced treatment effectiveness, significant relapse risk, and increased risk of death (Semahegn, 2020). Nonadherence to medication also results in increased healthcare...
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What Do We Know About the Relationship Between Cannabis and Psychosis?
From 2002 to 2021, the number of individuals aged 12 or older reporting last year cannabis use increased steadily from 26 million to 53 million (SAMHSA, 2022). Accompanying this increase in the number of individuals using cannabis is a decline in the percentage of individuals who believe that...
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Recovery: Realizing Hopes and Dreams
We must ensure that individuals living with mental illness have the opportunity to fulfill their hopes and dreams. To do so, all the systems and services we design must support the ability for individuals living with mental illness to thrive in their own community and reach their personal goals. We...
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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...
