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An Epidemic Rages On: “Treatment” Is Not Enough
Unprecedented rates of substance abuse and mental illness have afflicted nearly every segment of our population in recent years. This intractable public health crisis has led healthcare professionals, policymakers, and other stakeholders to reexamine longstanding assumptions concerning the...
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New York Vulnerable: A Look at the Governor’s New Mental Health Plan
Gov. Hochul’s new mental health initiative proves that there’s strength in acknowledging vulnerability - but one area of oversight is cause for concern. New York’s last governor may have adopted the motto “New York tough,” but current Governor Kathy Hochul’s new mental health...
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Consumer Perspectives: Regaining Hope in Our Future
This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on a particular topic. The authors are served by Services for the UnderServed (S:US), a New York City-based nonprofit that is committed to giving every New...
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Another Call for Quality Improvement
Twelve years ago, Dr. Anthony Weiss and I presented a paper to the Healthcare Division of the American Society for Quality. We made a call for quality improvement in behavioral health and argued that, in general, what passed for quality improvement was really about compliance. We were echoing a...
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45 Years Within Human Services – Reflections and Where We Go From Here
I have had the privilege of working within the field of autism over the past 45 years. For 24 of those years, I have been honored to work at Melmark, a multi-state human service provider with premier private special education schools, professional development, training, and research centers,...
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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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For One Mind, Too Many Silos
In the worlds of advocacy and policy making, there are sharp distinctions drawn among Alzheimer’s (and other dementias), mental illness, and substance use disorders. This results in separate, distinct, and insular fields of policy and practice, often referred to as “silos.” Frankly,...
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Crisis Intervention: Is the Field Ready?
The comments below are those of Joyce Wale, LCSW and do not reflect the opinions of United Healthcare or others. The New York State Office of Mental Health should be commended for their leadership and insight into the need for a comprehensive behavioral health system that is equipped to respond...
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The Myths, Abuses and Pseudoscience Surrounding “Evidence Based Medicine”
There are 3 types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Mark Twain). In approximately the last 10 years there’s been great interest in the concept of Evidence Based Medicine as a unifying concept for teaching, evaluating data and practicing medicine. The concept goes back at least 150 years to...
