February 2017

2017 Mississippi Trauma Informed Care Conference “Standing in the Eye of the Storm” September 27 - 29, 2017 Call for Presentations For the past 3 years, several state and local agencies have hosted a Trauma Informed Conference. Each year, the premiere conferences have brought together over 600 participants representing mental health and substance abuse professionals, first responders, crisis staff, educators, homelessness, domestic violence, human trafficking and other advocacy agencies,...

Sandra Bloom (left) and Leslie Lieberman, Senior Director at Health Federation of Philadelphia ___________________________ It was a mounting sense of anger that nudged Dr. Sandra Bloom from psychiatry to public health. After seeing thousands of patients—most of them trauma survivors being treated in an inpatient hospital setting—Bloom knew that she was not witnessing multiple, isolated, individual failures, but signs of a much bigger brokenness. “It became abundantly evident—and the Adverse...

Much attention and most governmental funding streams have been and continue to be focused on the addict. The addict has the problem; the addict needs to get better. The country is still however, only beginning to catch on to the devastating and long-term impact that growing up with addiction has on children, and what that experience does to the most vulnerable and dependent among us. Read the entire article>> Author: Tian Dayton , Psychologist, author, specialist in addictions and...

The Women’s March in Washington had three times more people in attendance than did President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many have argued about the reasons for these numbers (see here , here , and here ), and used them both individually and together to make claims about activism and political support . But something is missing from these conversations. In order to fully understand the differences in attendance at these events in D.C., and to avoid taking these numbers to mean something they...

A lone Anchorage prison guard sits at the receiving end of Alaska's failed mental health system, trying to keep 28 acutely disturbed men from harming themselves or others. The Mike Module, as the unit is called at Anchorage Correctional Complex, is staffed by a single corrections officer and a single nurse except when clinicians visit. I sat down with two retired officers to find out what that job is like. "It can be miserable," said Bobby Houser, who worked in the unit for a dozen years...

Dr. Arthur C. Evans steps down Friday after 12 years as commissioner of the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services – the name is one of myriad changes, large and small, that came under his watch. Evans brought tremendous vision and led a system-wide transformation effort focused on recovery, resilience, and self-determination . He embraced everything from prevention, early detection and intervention, to a variety of treatment types for the most serious...

Everyone gets the flu, chicken pox, and a broken bone or two by the time they hit 40, and if you don’t you’re in a very small minority that somehow lucked out. Scientists now believe the same is true when it comes to mental health disorders, and that if you happen to make it even half your lifetime without experiencing some type of temporary or chronic mental ailment, you’re actually pretty darn weird. In a study of 988 individuals, just 171 (roughly 17%) of them claimed to have never...

Tai Hooper, 34, and Hendriel Anderson, 40, roll into the parking lot of a Northwest Milwaukee housing complex and jump from their car. They’re running late. Both know the basics of the situation: A week earlier, Alexis Varnado, 17, had been playing Grand Theft Auto at her aunt’s house with her younger cousin when two young men came to rob the apartment. The burglars wore sweatshirts with the hoods pulled tight so that their faces were barely visible. They pushed the two into the younger...

Behavioral healthcare has been getting a great deal of attention lately from health IT experts, and not just because of a growing recognition that good mental health is key to improving overall patients outcomes. Behavioral health is one of the most complex, highly individualized, and notoriously underfunded components of the care continuum, which makes it a perfect test bed for deploying advanced machine learning tools that aim to tighten up care processes, improve access to resources, and...

“There’s an old saying in the medical community,” Dr. Jay Butler says, “statistics are people without the tears attached.” He’d know. He’s Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Division of Public Health at the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services and Chairman of the Alaska Opioid Policy Task Force. In the case of that second job description, sad stories are what drive his work. [For more of this story, written by Aurora Ford, go to ...

Today, U.S. Representatives Mike Coffman (R-CO) and Derek Kilmer (D-WA) led the bipartisan reintroduction of the Veteran Urgent Access to Mental HealthCare Act (H.R. 918). This legislation would allow the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to provide initial mental health assessments and urgent mental healthcare services to veterans at risk of suicide or harming others, even if they have another than honorable discharge. A service member receives a less than honorable discharge, or “bad...

A novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, James Baldwin was a writer with an arsenal of artistic talent and moral imagination. His signature style was his prose—startling in its intricate design and depth of perception, and fierce in its determination to dismantle the racial assumptions of the American republic and the English language. Baldwin lent his words and energies also to the civil-rights movement and would write one of the defining books of that era, The Fire Next Time, his 1963...