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Governor Hochul Launches Expansion of School-Based Mental Health Clinics to Combat Youth Mental Health Crisis
Governor Hochul announces $20 Million in Start Up Funding and Launches New Process to Expand School-Based Mental Health Clinics; Governor’s Budget Funds Clinics for Every Single School That Wants One Applications Now Open for Governor's New Youth Mental Health Advisory Board, Where Young New...
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Preparing Youth with Behavioral Health Needs to Enter the Workforce: A Pathway to Housing
Imagine sitting in a classroom, expected to absorb the curriculum, when you are extremely worried about whether your family will be evicted from their home. What can you, a young person trying to graduate from high school, do to change your circumstances? What if you have also survived traumatic...
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Suicide in Adolescents: Warning Signs, Risk Factors, and What Parents Can Do to Support Their Teens
Suicidality can affect all age groups, including during the adolescent years (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2023). The CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health (2023) reported data concerning U.S. high school students’...
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Using the Partnership to End Addiction’s Online Risk Assessment Tool to Assess and Combat Children’s Risk of Developing Addiction
As a society, we’re well versed in the factors that can increase our risk for diseases like cancer and diabetes. But what about risk factors for addiction? Addiction, like diabetes and cancer, is a disease. And as a disease, it is caused by a combination of many different factors:...
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The Adolescent Therapeutic Community: An Integrated Model of Care
I was once told early in my career that the Therapeutic Community (TC) takes an hour to explain but a lifetime to master. The traditional Therapeutic Community model has saved countless lives over the past several decades featuring a therapeutic milieu that uses the community as the healer and...
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Pediatric Behavioral Health Urgent Care: An Innovative Model of Care for Children and Adolescents
The Cohen Children’s Pediatric Behavioral Health Urgent Care Center (“BH Urgi”), located on Long Island, NY, is an alternative treatment setting for school-aged children and adolescents ages 5 through 17 in need of urgent mental health support. BH Urgi is intended to provide urgent or...
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Early Childhood Mental Health Clinic: Unmasking Social-Emotional Needs in Young Children
Think about this: a child who turned 5 years old in March 2022 will have spent 60% of their young life in the age of COVID. Most, if not all, of the child's active memories will be a time when traveling outside the home means wearing a mask. They were told that masks keep them safe; masks protect...
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The Integration of Treatment and Recovery: Special Considerations for Working with Children
Historically, the term “recovery” was commonly associated with substance use/addiction services and was popularized in the United States through Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) (Witkiewitz, K., et al., 2020). Beginning in 1939, AA published materials highlighting recovery as a personal journey toward...
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Context Counts in Caring for Chemically Dependent Kids and Families
Despite feeling blindsided, many of us now know that we are living in the midst of an unprecedented drug epidemic. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, since 1999, the rate of overdose deaths including prescription pain relievers, heroin and synthetic opioids such as...
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Essentials for Working with Teenagers in Groups
As we transition into a changing system of care, it is essential that we do not lose sight of fundamental practice skills such as tuning-in, engaging and contracting with teens and their families. Nowhere is this more critical than working with teens in groups. Group work cannot simply be a...