Stories From The Road

Cooper Riis & Recovery For Families Through Recovery Education

 

Sharon Young presented at the  North Carolina Recovery Conference  November 14, 2014 in Clemmons NC a presentation entitled "The Power of Family Integration &  Natural Supports: Creating &  Educating Recovery Teams". The background and reason for developing such a program was born out of CooperRiis in their bi-annual family education weekends & informal staff support that they were offering to families. The families loved it and then they began to ask for more.  The research done at Cooper Riis indicated that family education like this below improved the long-term outcomes of treatment for those that they provide care for.

The Power of Family Integration & Natural Supports: Creating & Educating Recovery Teams from CooperRiis Healing Community

 

Web Resources for the Peer Support Community in North Carolina

 

 Alcohol/Drug Council of NC

Throughout its history, ADCNC has presented and promoted creative  solutions to gaps in the continuum of services for addicts and their  families. ADCNC also has provided leadership resulting in the passage of  state legislation addressing the disease of addiction.

              Link: http://www.alcoholdrughelp.org/       

 

NC Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services

North Carolina will provide people with, or at risk of, mental illness, developmental disabilities and substance abuse problems and their families the necessary, prevention, intervention, treatment, services and supports they need to live successfully in communities of their choice.

 

 

 

             

Link: http://www.ncdhhs.gov/mhddsas/       

 

NC Mental Health Consumers Organization

The North Carolina Mental Health Consumers' Organization is a private  non-profit organization established in 1989 to offer advocacy and  support to adults with mental illness.

NC MHCO is special because it is "peer-run" meaning all the board  members and all staff has personal life experiences with mental illness.  The board is comprised of sixteen members, four from each region of the  state. Board members are elected by the membership.

 

              Link: http://www.ncmhco.org/       

 

North Carolina Consumer Advocacy, Networking, and Support Organization

North Carolina Consumer Advocacy, Networking, and Support Organization was established in 2009.  It is fully peer operated.  The emphasis of its work has been on ensuring that people with lived experience with mental illness and recovery are valued participants in systems advocacy and change.  It has focused much of its effort on strengthening the role of peer support in our state to improve the quality of people's lives and their recovery.  It is a non-profit organization.

              Link: http://www.nccanso.org       

 

Recovery.org

If you or someone you love is trying to make a complete drug or alcohol recovery, you'll want to make sure you choose well. Whether you require a luxury residential addiction program, executive substance abuse treatment or just an outpatient program, we provide toll-free help 888-968-7541.

              Link: http://www.recovery.org/       

 

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Treatment Administration

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services  Administration’s  (SAMHSA) mission is to reduce the impact of substance abuse  and mental  illness on America’s  communities.  SAMHSA, in collaboration with other  Federal agencies, States, Tribes, local organizations,  and  individuals including consumers and the recovery community, has  demonstrated  again and again in research and practice -  prevention works, treatment is effective, and people recover from  mental  and substance use disorders.

              Link: http://www.samhsa.gov/       

 

Questions concerning the Peer Support Program? Call 919-843-3018 or email us at: [email protected]

Behavioral Healthcare Resource Program | School of Social Work | University of North Carolina 325 Pittsboro Street | CB# 3550 | Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Promise Resource Network: Charlotte’s Peer & Mental Health Recovery Collaborative

 

Who They Are

 

Promise Resource Network is a collaborative of peers, providers, families and community members committed to enhancing mental health recovery through education and system transformation. Promise Resource Network (formerly Mecklenburg’s PROMISE) employs individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges, who advance the understanding of recovery and best practices through training, consultation, peer support and advocacy.

It is a peer-operated 501c3 that is devoted to enhancing lives, communities, and families impacted by mental health and substance use challenges. By creating opportunities for recovery, advancing recovery knowledge and skills, and pairing our personal and professional experience of recovery, PRN challenges people to recover, systems to innovate, and practitioners to provide effective supports.

 

Their Vision

"We envision that every person experiencing emotional challenges will find the hope, inspiration and supports to move through challenges, discover their strengths, live their dreams, and find meaningful purpose in their lives."

 

Their Mission

"We are a team, united by our personal and professional experiences, partnering with individuals, organizations and communities to instill hope and encourage personal growth by providing education, consultation and peer support to advance recovery in policy and practice."

 

Their Initiatives

Recovery-oriented system transformation requires a presence and relevance at local, state and national levels. To pursue our mission and vision, PRN has established various initiatives that directly impact individual people and families, provider organizations and practitioners as well as communities and systems.

 

Recovery Hub

The Recovery Hub is an epicenter of recovery activity for Mecklenburg County. It is a partnership between PRN and Meridian Behavioral Health that offers an array of recovery-based supports. Our Recovery Navigators explore local opportunities, resources, and services with people to move beyond the illness-maintenance cycle under which traditional behavioral health systems operate to dream big and move toward their aspirations and dreams. The Recovery Hub also provides free daily recovery classes, home and community-based peer support,brief solution-focused therapy, and assistance to pursue home ownership, build financial health, succeed in employment aspirations and accomplish educational goals. The Recovery Hub is a Mecklenburg County initiative, designed to offer a variety of recovery-based resources for people with MH/SA challenges in our community that do not have Medicaid benefits.

 

Recovery University

Recovery University is a national technical assistance center that offers recovery trainings, webinars, and consultation to organizations, managed care organizations, and states as they move toward a recovery-based behavioral health system of care that expects high fidelity evidence-based practices,has as its foundation psychiatric rehabilitation, and yields recovery and personal quality of life outcomes.

 

Peer Academy

Peer Academy is their training and technical assistance entity that invests in future and current Peer Support Specialists and peer supervisors to build knowledge, skills and tools needed for effective peer support.

 

NC Employment First Technical Assistance Center

The NC|EF|TAC was established in response to a Department of Justice settlement that highlights employment as an effective path to recovery. Our NC|EF|TAC disseminates information on the evidence-based supported employment model, Individualized Placement and Support (IPS), and provides training to all Supported Employment IPS teams and Assertive Community Treatment team Employment Specialists in North Carolina. In partnership with the NC Best Practices Team, our TAC employees also conduct independent fidelity reviews and provides individualized technical assistance to managed care agencies and behavioral health organizations as they transition away from "readiness" approaches to "Employment First."

 

How To Contact

 

Promise Resource Network

1041 Hawthorne Lane

Charlotte, NC 28205

980-321-4021

 

 Peer Support, Recovery and Crisis Education:

 Kim Roszelle

 [email protected]

 (980) 321-4022

 

Schedule Community Presentations and Consultation:

Cherene Caraco

[email protected]

(704) 776-6708

 

Nutrition and Mental Health: "Wholesome Wave" (Blog Re-post)

 

Blog Article "Wholesome Wave" from Mad in America posted September 4, 2014

Article written by two experts in the field of Nutrition and Mental Health:

Bonnie Kaplan, Ph.D. and Julia Rucklidge, Ph.D.

Bonnie Kaplan has published widely on the biological basis of developmental disorders and mental health – particularly, the contribution of nutrition to brain development and brain function. Her nutrition-related studies have been in several areas, especially: 1) broad spectrum micronutrient treatments for mental disorders, and 2) the effect of intrauterine nutrition on brain development and maternal mental health (www.ApronStudy.ca).

Julia Rucklige's current research interests can be found at www.mentalhealthandnutrition.co.nz and her institute can be found at: http://www.psyc.canterbury.ac.nz/people/rucklidge.shtml

 -----------The Article----------------

 We took a break of several months to attend to a variety of other tasks/deadlines.  Now we are delighted to return to some of the other topics we promised you in the past.

But first, let’s recap some of the major points from our first dozen blog posts:

• The brain consumes – disproportionately – the most energy of any organ in our body. So when we eat, we need to be thinking about what our brain needs for optimal function.
• The importance of nutrition for brain function has been recognized for millennia. The first ‘clinical trial’ of the mental effects of diet was reported ~3500 years ago, in the Book of Daniel.
• By the early 20^th century, it was accepted wisdom that mental illness was caused by suboptimal nutrition — knowledge that was swept away by the development of psychopharmacology halfway through that century. In fact, when the Minnesota Starvation Experiment showed in the 1950s that suboptimal nutrient intake caused severe psychiatric symptoms, those findings were ignored.
• Scientists wanting to study the impact of nutrients on mental health were stonewalled by ‘magic bullet thinking,’ as well as the Scientific Method as it was interpreted in the 20^th century. As we wrote previously, in The Inane Search for Magic Bullets to Treat Mental Illness: “What’s wrong with this single-nutrient literature? With precious few exceptions, all of it — hundreds of studies and millions of research dollars — has been wrongly based on the idea that a treatment must consist of just one nutrient at a time.” The minimal benefits demonstrable from a single nutrient (outside frank deficiency syndromes like pellagra) led people to dismiss the overall idea that minerals and vitamins were important candidate treatments.
• We wrote about a child in Calgary whose severe psychosis was successfully treated with broad spectrum minerals and vitamins, at <1% of the cost of his unsuccessful inpatient treatment (Rodway et al., 2012). The cost savings of nutrient treatment alone makes it imperative that our society pay attention to this topic.
• We wrote about Julia’s amazing research that demonstrated that micronutrient treatment helped ordinary citizens (a nonclinical sample) cope better with the devastating earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010-11 (Rucklidge et al., 2012). The message is clear: an excellent, inexpensive public health intervention to protect the mental health of a populace dealing with an environmental catastrophe would be to hand out minerals and vitamins.
• We reviewed the field of Nutritional Epidemiology, only about 10 years old, that shows that patterns of food intake in populations are associated with mental symptoms.
• We analyzed and dispensed with the accusations that taking nutrient supplements only creates expensive urine (at best) and might be harmful to our health (at worst).
• We introduced our readers to the work of Paul Amminger, who has shown that nutrient supplementation (omega-3s in his work) at the time of a first episode of psychosis can provide long-term resistance to further episodes (Amminger et al., 2010).
• And since both of us are totally convinced of the importance of treating with broad spectrum formulas, we were delighted to describe to you Julia’s randomized, placebo-controlled trial that showed significant benefit from a multinutrient mineral/vitamin formulation in adults with ADHD and mood dysregulation (Rucklidge et al., 2014).

So we covered a lot of ground, but the list of topics we hope to cover in the near future is even longer.  Today, we want to discuss this one: IF NOT MEDS, THEN WHAT? Of course, a great deal of the information published on MadInAmerica is devoted to this very important question, so many constructive ideas are often presented. We think that nutrition and diet should always be part of the conversation, as both moderator variables and mediator variables. You may have heard these terms before. Let’s get academic for just a moment and look at the formal definitions:

• A moderator variable is one that affects the direction and/or strength of the relation between an independent variable and a dependent variable.
• A variable is a mediator to the extent that it actually accounts for the relation between the independent and dependent variables.

Another way to say this:  a moderator variable is one that influences the strength of a relationship between two other variables, and a mediator variable is one that explains the actual relationship between the two other variables. Perhaps the best illustration of this issue relates to the issue of predictors of mental illness. The most consistent predictors over decades of research have included poverty and family dysfunction. Family dysfunction can of course be a significant moderator variable: if a family models violent or aggressive behaviour, then that is what children learn. But it is also true that poverty and family dysfunction can be mediators, in that they can account for mental problems because they result in suboptimal nutrition.

Is poverty an important mediator in the relationship between nutrition and mental health? Obviously it is. And here is a disturbing statistic: an astounding 16% of Americans now report running out of food sometimes. This report really illustrates this problem.  Processed foods that are nutrient-poor are less expensive to buy. People who are impoverished are also sometimes in circumstances where they cannot access whole foods or have no facility for storing them (as in the linked report). How can they possibly consume an optimal diet? The challenges are enormous.

In our next blog, we’ll tell you about one of the amazing programs addressing these challenges, called Wholesome Wave.

North Carolina Peer Linked-In Site

 

Check out North Carolina's Peer Linked-In Site for interesting discussion on relevant issues related to peer supports and the peer workforce. It is a social media public forum, for North Carolina Certified Peer Support Specialists.

 

The Vision for Peer Support in North Carolina

 

From UNC's Behavioral Health Resource Program they share their vision for peer support for NC.

The Vision

To develop a qualified Peer Support Specialist workforce that has the support, access, credibility, competency, respect and the valued role within the mental health and substance use disorder service delivery system to positively impact the lives of individuals experiencing mental health and addiction challenges.  This is accomplished through the NC Certified Peer Support Specialist Program.

As of 10/31/2014 there are 1437 Certified Peer Support Specialists in North Carolina.

As of 10/31/2014 there are 46 Certified Peer Support Specialists from out of state.

Click to view the map

As of 10/31/2014 there are a total of 1483 Certified Peer Support Specialists.

Steve Harrington's Webinar in Build Your Resume: Strategies for Getting, Keeping and Advancing Employment

 

NOV. 21, 2014

Time: Noon – 1:00 p.m. Eastern

(11 a.m. Central, 10 a.m. Mountain, 9 a.m. Pacific)

November Free Webinar!

Build Your Resume: Strategies for Getting,

Keeping and Advancing Employment

 

Join Steve Harrington, Director of the International Association of Peer Supporters (iNAPS), as he explores—through an interactive session—ways to build resumes, obtain employment and advance careers.

Steve Harrington, Director of the International Association of Peer Supporters (iNAPS)

 These are important skills for peer supporters and those they support. The session will use the “chat” function during the webinar so participants can share strategies such as how to fill in resume “gaps,” enjoy a sense of job security, and advance one’s career.

To join the online meeting (Now from mobile devices too!)

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1. Click https://optum.webex.com/optum/j.phpMTID=m1a18bae04091baad33db8e8a7f010696

2. Follow all prompts to access audio and join the webinar. You will be asked to

provide a telephone number. Please be sure to provide a single-line number without

an extension. You will be called back and given directions immediately.

Questions? Contact us at [email protected]

Or visit the Free Webinars page on our website: http://inaops.org/free-webinar-series