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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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Caring for Yourself: Learning to Live with a Substance Use Disorder
Substance use and misuse have reached epidemic proportions across the United States. In a 2020 survey, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) estimated that more than 40 million individuals across the country over the age of 12 have a substance use disorder, with...
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Lessons Learned in Effectively Advancing Co-Occurring Competent Care
Recently, there has been great emphasis on enhancing organizational co-occurring competency and for good reason. Climbing overdose and suicide rates, with bi-directional contribution from mental health (MH) and substance use disorders (SUD), reflect our need to do better serving those with multiple...
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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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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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Suicide Risk and Safety Planning
Behavioral health workers are understandably distressed by the recent rise in the rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and reported suicidal ideation, including increases among teens and young adults, minorities, and those affected by the Covid-19 pandemic (Molock et al, 2023; Pathirathna et al,...
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From Crisis to Recovery: The Role of Peer Support Specialists at NYC Well
In her foreword to Intimations, written on May 31, 2020, novelist Zadie Smith states that as a result of reading Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, she discovered “two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.” That she...
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Ketamine for Mental Health Treatment: How Promising Is It?
For centuries, we have sought cures for depression. Some discoveries, such as psychotherapy and medication treatment, are now widely accepted. But they don’t work for everyone. More recently, an unorthodox drug has garnered attention as a new, possible intervention: ketamine. Classified as...
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The Lens of Loss: Perspectives of Family Members Following Suicide Loss
When we think about the suicide of a loved one, we think of profound loss, of grief, of finding a way to endure amid unyielding pain. But we gain something in the aftermath, one nearly as burdensome. It is a new perspective: Loss becomes a lens through which life is lived. And it can be difficult...
