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New York City’s clubhouses — member-run facilities that offer support to those with serious mental health conditions — are proving that recovery and rehabilitation are possible, with some lawmakers like Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., hoping to expand the availability and access to these institutions for more residents.

Fountain House, which touts itself as the pioneer of the modern clubhouse model, aims to put an end to the “punitive, ineffective and costly” approaches to those with mental illness, who cycle through jails, emergency rooms, shelters and the streets without proper care or support to lead healthy and happy lives, the organization said.

The goal is to give members a sense of stability and community. At the clubhouses, they get a helping hand to obtain an education, find work, achieve health goals while readily having access to clinical care, housing assistance and other supportive services.

“What we are looking to do is to help people truly recover, and so that means help them return to jobs, be neighbors, and live out in the community and to have meaningful relationships,” Ian Campbell, Fountain House’s Senior Director of Employment and Learning, told ABC News.

What makes the clubhouse model so successful, Campbell said, is that they fill gaps not filled in a clinical setting. They support members with both economic barriers as well as the loneliness or isolation that patients are likely to also be experiencing.

About 15% of people with severe mental illness successfully return to work, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness — but at Fountain House, 25 to 30% of their active membership has returned to work.

A New York University study on Fountain House found that its services save Medicaid costs by up to 21% by reducing hospitalizations and ER visits as well as increasing primary care visits, increased outpatient mental health visits, and increased pharmacy visits – “essentially a better adherence to other forms of treatment that can further support members’ recovery,” Fountain House said in a statement.

Read more at ABCNews.Go.com.

Maternal mental health conditions are among the most prevalent complications during pregnancy and the postpartum period. There is also a significant economic burden associated with maternal mental health, costing $14 billion annually.

However, there are efforts to improve care for mothers struggling with maternal mental health challenges, including the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program (MCPAP) for Moms. It helps providers address mental health issues of pregnant and postpartum patients. The program was discussed last week during a panel at the Behavioral Health Tech conference in Phoenix, in which experts shared how they successfully expanded the program across the country.

MCPAP for Moms was founded in 2014 by Nancy Byatt, a tenured professor at UMass Chan Medical School. On the panel, Byatt shared that she knows first hand the need for better maternal mental health support.

Because of this experience, Byatt went on to become a perinatal psychiatrist. Her patients often shared that they didn’t realize they were depressed until much later. Additionally, many had seen multiple healthcare professionals who never asked about their mental health or discussed depression with them.

According to Byatt, MCPAP for Moms has three core components. It provides training for obstetricians on how to talk about maternal mental health, screen for it and address it. For those who screen positive for maternal mental health conditions, MCPAP for Moms can offer consultation. Lastly, the program gives resources and referrals to help patients navigate the healthcare system. In total, the program costs $14 per woman per year, Byatt added.

Read more at MedCityNews.com.

In this free webinar on December 3 hosted by the Yarrow Collective, special guest Laura Delano will share about her 13-year psychiatrization and how she left behind her relationship to the mental health industry, focusing on her experience coming off psychiatric drugs and eventually helping others do the same. She will offer a high-level overview of safer tapering practices, strategies for managing withdrawal, and tips for communicating with family members and prescribers. Whether attendees are taking psychiatric drugs, in the midst of coming off them, already off them, or supporting others on the withdrawal journey, this webinar will provide valuable insights and practical advice.

Laura Delano is the founder and Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people make more informed choices about psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and drug withdrawal. Separately, Laura offers psychiatric drug withdrawal support through 1-on-1 consultations and a recently launched group support program called Fortify & Focus. She has spoken and led workshops across Europe and the Americas, and her first book, UNSHRUNK, will be published in the US, UK, and Commonwealth countries in March 2025.

Register today with the Yarrow Collective!

As of September, more than 25 million Americans — including 1.9 million Floridians — had lost Medicaid coverage since the expiration of federal covid-19 pandemic protections in March 2023 that had kept people continually enrolled. Among them were patients in treatment for opioid addiction, such as Stephanie, for whom a loss of coverage could be deadly.

Research shows that, when taken as prescribed, medications for opioid use disorder — such as methadone and a similar medicine, buprenorphine — can reduce dangerous drug use and cut overdose fatalities by more than half. Other studies have found the risk of overdose and death increases when treatment is interrupted.

It is unclear how many people with opioid addiction have lost coverage in the Medicaid disenrollment, known as the “unwinding.” But researchers at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News, estimate that more than 1 million low-income Americans depend on the federal-state Medicaid program for lifesaving addiction care.

Methadone and buprenorphine are considered the gold standard of care for opioid addiction. The drugs work by binding to the brain’s opioid receptors to block cravings and withdrawal symptoms without making a person feel high. Treatment reduces illicit drug use and the accompanying overdose risk.

However, few Americans who could benefit from the medicines actually receive them: The latest federal data shows that in 2021 only about 1 in 5 people who needed the medicines got them. The low numbers offer a sharp contrast to the record-high drug overdose epidemic, which killed nearly 108,000 Americans in 2022 and is driven primarily by opioids.

Even before the Medicaid unwinding, about 13% of people younger than 65 in Florida were uninsured, one of the highest rates in the country, according to census data. Florida is also one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid for low-income adults.

Read more at KFFHealthNews.org.

The Department of Veterans Affairs actively encourages veterans to enroll in VA health care, and officials, including VA Secretary Denis McDonough, voice pride in the department’s expertise treating combat-related mental health conditions. In 2023 alone, nearly 11% of the nation’s 18.1 million veterans sought mental health services at the VA, having 19.6 million behavioral health “encounters” with the VA, including appointments, walk-ins and emergency room visits.

But veterans say they often can’t get individual therapy appointments to accompany psychiatric medical care, and when they do connect, the treatment often is derailed by appointment cancellations and scheduling problems, according to more than a dozen veterans and current and former VA employees interviewed by Military.com.

They shared remarkably similar stories of working up the courage to seek help — something that historically has not been easy in a community skeptical of mental health treatment — and waiting months for sessions as multiple appointments were canceled, either at the start of a telehealth session or on arrival at a medical center or clinic.

Data provided by the VA showed that from 2020 through 2023, the cancellation rate for mental health appointments across facilities averaged 10.6%, with a high of 12.1% in 2020 early in the COVID-19 pandemic to 9.2% in 2023.

But individual medical centers may have bigger issues. Data obtained by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed that at 14 representative facilities across the U.S., from January 2020 to late May 2021, the cancellation rate was nearly double the VA provided figures, at 21%, although the time frame coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on non-urgent care.

Theories on the causes of cancellations vary. VA employees who spoke with Military.com said provider shortages are the root cause, while others point to the lack of a centralized scheduling system or pressure to keep veteran care inside the walls of a VA facility.

The VA has 32,199 mental health workers, including psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed professional mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, peer support specialists, nurses and physician assistants, on staff, and officials say they are hiring more.

But the VA struggles to recruit clinicians, especially to rural locales and areas with underserved populations, and it competes with the private sector, where, in many places, quality care commands cash-only payments. According to the VA Inspector General in September, 66 of the VA’s 140 health systems reported severe shortages of psychiatric providers.

VA officials said patient requests for mental health care have grown steadily in the past 10 years at a rate that far exceeds demand for overall health services, and they have shifted toward a more proactive approach that includes case management, outreach and “stepped-care,” meaning it may begin a patient with group therapy, self-help or brief sessions and proceed to more intensive treatment as needed.

The VA also has hired more mental health providers — including 4,106 last year.

Read more at Military.com.

The arrival of nearly 215,000 migrants into New York City since the spring of 2022 has placed significant demands on mental health service agencies and community organizations that were already stretched thin by COVID-19. A study led by researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY), for example, found that rates of mental health problems among Harlem residents were two to three times higher in 2021 than they were before the pandemic, people living in low-income housing facing twice as many barriers to health care than those living in market-rate housing.

NYC Health + Hospitals responded to the influx of asylum seekers by opening an arrival center in May 2023 as part of Mayor Eric Adam’s Blueprint to Address New York City’s Response to the Asylum Seeker Crisis. Based in the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, it provided medical, social, and resettlement services to nearly 150,000 people from more than 160 countries in its first year. Additionally, arrival center staff have used the patient health questionnaire to screen more than 130,000 migrants age 12 and older for depression since May 2024, those showing symptoms being then further assessed and provided with referrals to necessary care.

Harlem Strong and ENGAGE are two New York City–based efforts that are bringing people together and adapting models originally developed to provide mental health services to people in low- or middle-income countries for use in an urban context.

Harlem Strong is a collaboration led by the CUNY Center for Innovation in Mental Health, Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, Harlem Health Initiative, and Healthfirst Managed Care, the state’s largest nonprofit health insurer. ENGAGE partners Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry, the New York State Office of Mental Health, and three community-based organizations: Acacia Network, S:US (Services for the Underserved), and African Services Committee.

Both efforts train non–health-care staff at community-based organizations to identify people with behavioral health needs and either provide or refer them to necessary services.

Read more at ThinkingGlobalHealth.org.