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Understanding and Addressing Childhood Trauma
Everyone experiences scary or difficult events in their lives. For some children, these events can be so frightening or dangerous that they can have a lasting impact on their well-being. Trauma refers to the physical, cognitive, and emotional responses to an event (or events) that is physically or...
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Working Toward Employment: A Journey of Growth and Support
As a young woman, Lisa was told that she would never work. She suffers from serious mental illness and has experienced multiple traumas during her lifetime. Now 59 years old, she lives in a supportive group home and is a participant in the Personalized Recovery Oriented Services (PROS) program at...
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Just Another Day
What does mental illness feel like? It feels like drowning, alone and helpless, surrounded by nothing but inky black water, and deafening silence. As an icy chill creeps down your spine, a paralyzing numbness begins to set in. Breathing is very difficult now as you feel a sudden scalding hot...
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Basic Research Has Had a Major Impact on Developing New Treatments for Serious Mental Illnesses
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with an estimated $2 trillion annual economic impact. The cost in terms of human suffering is, of course, incalculable. Each year about 8% of adults—nearly 20 million Americans—experience major depression; 8% of adolescents experience at...
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Supporting Veterans and Families in Conquering PTSD
As the echoes of war fade, a different kind of battle wages on for many courageous veterans who return home. An estimated 6% of US adults, or 6 out every 100 people, will be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), at some point in their lifetime. In veterans, it increases to 7 out of...
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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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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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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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Working with Newly Arrived Asylum Seekers: A Firsthand Look
New York Psychotherapy and Counseling Center (NYPCC) has been working with newly arrived immigrants since inception in 1974. With the majority of our clinicians bi-lingual, we pride ourselves in meeting the mental health needs of our Latinx population through a culture lens. It’s one thing to...
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Applied Behavior Analysis as a Treatment for Survivors of Trauma
Understanding trauma has become a major focus for many different fields of mental health, with each proposing a different strategy for addressing traumatic symptoms and core issues. This has not been an easy feat for several reasons. First, the current reports of trauma are only as accurate as the...
