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In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Family Ties Enterprises, has been selected as the Partner of the Month for August.

Family Ties Enterprise is a organization that assists families in skill and resource development necessary to safely maintain children in their home in Georgia. They strive that each family has the ability to address any situation they may face. Family Ties, Inc. was founded in 1994 to provide intensive, home-based counseling and community integration services for families and children.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) Services – Family Ties is a Licensed Provider approved to provide all services under the Comprehensive Child and Family Assessment (CCFA) program, including family assessments, wrap around services and adolescent assessments. Family Ties, Inc. assists families in the skill and resource development necessary to safely maintain children in their home.
• Medicaid Funded Mental Health Services (CORE) – Family Ties is a Child and Adolescent Medicaid approved Core Provider and a State Fee For Service approved Provider ( which allows uninsured children up to the age of 21 if the child is still in school) access to free in-home mental health services. Family Ties accepts PeachState, WellCare,  and Medicaid . They Provide in-home services in the following counties: Cherokee, Cobb, Dekalb, Douglas, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Hall, Henry, and Rockdale.
• TeleMental Health –  Giving people the opportunity to speak to a clinical team through the use of an online device, ensuring that families has access to services and needs at all times.
• School Based Program Services – For School based services, most referrals are made by the counselor or social worker at one of out partner schools. Families who students attend one of our partner schools can make a referral via our online referral or by downloading and emailing the referral to SBP@familytiesinc.com.

Learn more about Family Ties Enterprises and their belief that with proper support, education and encouragement, families can establish goals and a value base that will guide them in their development; and that values dictate actions and only through a change of values can true behavioral change take place.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

In the past few years, opioids have seen an increase in media attention, as the country grapples with what has been called an opioid epidemic. However, opioid addiction is not just a plague of recent decades; the phenomenon of widespread opioid addiction dates back to the 19th century when the Civil War sparked the United States’ first opiate addiction epidemic among ailing veterans. Nineteenth-century opiate addiction cases usually originated in doctors’ prescriptions, a disturbing parallel with today’s ongoing opioid crisis resulting from opioid overprescribing during the 1990s.

The alarming parallels between the 19th- and 21st-century opioid crises in the United States are not limited to iatrogenesis. Both crises exhibit a history of troubling racial inequalities in access to opioids as well. Addiction was far more common among White Civil War veterans than among Black veterans, who lacked equitable access to opiates. This pattern presaged the opioid underprescribing experienced by Black Americans in recent decades.

Racial disparities in access to essential opioid medicines has been a persistent feature in American health care, both during the Civil War era and in recent decades. Amidst the ongoing opioid crisis, multiple studies have found that Black Americans are less likely to suffer from prescription opioid addiction than White Americans. Like Black Civil War veterans in the late 19th century, African Americans today have less access to prescription opioid painkillers than White Americans. Persistent racial disparities in opioid prescribing rates have been so extreme that, until recently, White Americans were about twice as likely to die from prescription opioid overdose as African Americans.

Read more PsychiatricTimes.com.

As the LGBTQIA+ population faces greater stigma, discrimination, harassment and violence, they bear a higher risk of behavioral health issues, including addiction or substance use disorders (SUD). Just so, members of these communities report significantly higher rates of illicit drug use.

The connection between LGBTQIA+ identities and substance use disorders has been substantiated by recent studies. One of the largest federally-funded surveys of its kind — the 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) — collected data from sexual minority adults (defined there as individuals who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual), comparing patterns of substance use between this population and heterosexual adults.

Overall, the 2018 survey found that members of the LGBTQIA+ population are twice as likely to struggle with a SUD than their counterparts. Opioid use (including heroin) stood at 9% among sexual minorities, compared to 3.8% of the other. Many of these individuals who struggle with substance use disorders do so alongside other co-occurring conditions, such as depression, anxiety, compulsive sexual disorders, mood disorders, self-harm, and suicidality.

One obstacle to treatment is the lack of specialized inpatient drug and alcohol options addressed to the particular needs of the LGBTQIA+ population.

Read more at PhillyVoice.com.

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously to approve bipartisan legislation to expand mental health care for rural veterans. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Biden for his signature. The Sgt. Ketchum Rural Veterans’ Mental Health Act, named in memory of Iowa veteran Brandon Ketchum, establishes new Rural Access Network for Growth Enhancement (RANGE) programs through the Department of Veteran Affairs and supports additional research on rural veteran mental health care needs.

According to the VA, at least one in five veterans return from combat with at least one serious mental health condition, yet 85% of rural residents live in a Mental Health Care Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA).

“I can think of no better way to honor the memory and service of Iowa veteran Brandon Ketchum, who lost his own battle with PTSD after not getting the care he needed when he returned home, than Congress approving legislation named in his honor to secure better care for our veterans,” says Rep. Cindy Axne, D-Iowa, a lead sponsor of the bill. “When our veterans return home, the care they receive shouldn’t be determined by their zip code. The bipartisan legislation now headed to the President’s desk will help ensure veterans in our rural areas get the support they need.”

To address the growing number of mental health needs of returning veterans, the VA developed RANGE programs, which provide a small team of specialists to meet the needs of rural veterans with serious mental health and daily living issues. In addition to establishing three new veteran mental health programs, the new legislation bill will direct the Government Accountability Office to study how the VA can improve mental health care for rural veterans to enable better response in the future for veterans like Sgt. Ketchum who request treatment.

Read more at FarmProgress.com.

Millions of dollars’ worth of new housing vouchers are becoming available on Oahu just as a statewide ban on COVID-19- related evictions is scheduled to end in August, leading to fears that a new generation of families is about to become homeless. So a hui of government officials and nonprofit agencies are scrambling to convince more landlords to take advantage of new federal funding to house people already homeless across Oahu and those who are soon to become homeless.

A new program called Oahu Housing Now began placing homeless clients into market-rate rental units in April using nearly $11 million in new federal COVID-19 funds. The program operates similarly to the existing state and county Housing First programs. Landlords are guaranteed rent and utility payments for the life of a lease, repairs for damage, and access to case managers for any issues with clients.

Landlords who might need even more convincing to house Oahu Housing Now clients could possibly receive 13 months of rent for a one-year lease, said Laura Thielen, executive director of Partners in Care, which oversees Oahu Housing Now.

But while Housing First is designed for Hawaii’s most chronically and severe homeless, including those with mental health and substance abuse issues, Oahu Housing Now targets homeless clients “who could be working and newly homeless,” said Scott Morishige, the state’s homeless coordinator. “This program targets that layer below, the newly homeless who could be working on getting employment.”

Read more at StarAdvertiser.com.

Uma Acharya knows the daily hardships that refugees must go through just to survive. Born in a refugee camp in Nepal after her family escaped government persecution in Bhutan, she witnessed the poor living conditions and lack of resources during the 15 years she spent there before resettling in the United States. There was never enough food for the family; Acharya’s parents had to leave their camp to do farm work for days or months on end just to feed her and her two siblings. Some of their neighbors who left the camp for heavy labor never came back alive.

Now a 27-year-old, Columbus-based mental health counselor who specializes in serving refugees, Acharya said her own traumatic experiences have helped her relate to those she is treating.

“I have so many questions to ask them because I know what they had to go through just to survive,” Acharya said. “I always ask my client, ‘How did you feel at the time?’ and ‘What did you have to go through to get food?’”

Acharya is a part of a seven-person team at the Center for New Americans, a community program located on the East Side that caters to the specific mental health needs of central Ohio’s Bhutanese-Nepali residents. Unlike mainstream service providers that offer sessions only in English or have to rely on interpreters to communicate with Nepali-speaking clients, most counselors at the Center for New Americans speak Nepali and are former refugees themselves. Recruiting members from specific communities is key to offering culturally and linguistically competent counseling.

In Franklin County, there are approximately 23,500 Bhutanese-Nepali refugees, a group that suffers disproportionately with mental health challenges. The suicide rate among Bhutanese-Nepali refugees is twice as high as that among the general American population, research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. But there are not just not enough Nepali-speaking counselors in the area, advocates said.

Read more at Dispatch.com.