Mental Horizons Podcast

Season 3, Episode 4 of the Mental Horizons Podcast with Delia Cimpean Hendrick, M.D., WestBridge, Manchester, NH. "Achieving Excellence in the Treatment of Co-Occurring Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder" World renowned Delia Cimpean Hendrick, M.D. joins Virgil Stucker on a Mental Horizons podcast to discuss how to achieve excellence in the treatment of co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Triple Boarded in psychiatry, addictions and internal medicine, Dr. Delia helps us to envision solutions, in which she has experience as the medical director of WestBridge.org. Learn also how she leads the field in integrating physical health care into their model of comprehensive treatment. Our podcast is now in its third season with over 10,000 vews. Our objective is to bring you conversations with solution-oriented mental health leaders. Please email us if you are, or know, such leaders who would like to be interviewed to [email protected]. Please remember as well to review our solution-oriented book, found on Amazon: A Family Guide to Mental Health Recovery: What You Need to Know from Day One.

Guest: ROCCO MAROTTA, M.D., Ph.D., Silver Hill Hospital, New Canaan CT. Dr. Marotta - “Rocky” - is one of the most compassionate, committed, and creative psychiatrists we have known. He is a leader at Silver Hill Hospital in CT. Our Mental Horizons podcast explores his innovative work and gives insight into what has driven him for decades to help some of the most vulnerable in society. In particular we discuss how use of oxytocin, the ‘love’ hormone, can help people with psychosis.

We are joined by attorney Lisa Cukier, Esq., partner at Burns & Levinson, LLC, who is guiding families to innovative and compassionate short and long-term legal solutions for mental health treatment and recovery during these waves of coronavirus.

This is the first episode of season 3 of Mental Horizons Podcast. In this episode, we learn how residential therapeutic communities may be some of the safest, most effective places for mental health recovery during this fearful time of the COVID-19 crisis and civil unrest. Our guests are Lisanne Finston, leader of Gould Farm in MA, America’s Oldest therapeutic community for individuals recovering from mental illness, Rochelle Rothwell, leader of Rose Hill Center in MI and Eric Levine, leader of the CooperRiis Healing Community in NC. Their nonprofit therapeutic communities are essential resources in mental health recovery, helping hundreds of individuals and families each year to achieve and sustain their highest levels of functioning and fulfillment in life.

Almost over night, most of us have joined both pop-up and professional online communities during this COVID-19 global pandemic. We thrive in community, because humans are meant to live and work in close relationship with others. But what happens when these virtual meetings miss their mark? In this episode of the Mental Horizons Podcast, Virgil describes the Healing Community Matrix tool he designed during his career in nonprofit leadership. It is a tool he has used many times in therapeutic communities to assess the health and wellbeing of its members and their experience of connection (or not) as part of that community.

This special episode is part of our Mental Horizons podcast series responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and how it is impacting the world and, more specifically, the mental health field. Stephanie spoke with Katie Mansfield about trauma resilience in the face of immense stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. They discussed how to recognize trauma and the strategies one can cultivate to cope with adversity. Katie is lead trainer for the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program within Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Brad Richards, psychiatric interventionist, returns to the podcast to share tips around how therapists and medical professionals can best deliver support through online and remote means. In this time of crisis, tele-health is scaling up rapidly, breaking down barriers to delivering care. How does one build connection and rapport across a video screen? Listen as Brad shared specific techniques and tools he uses in his own work to stay connected with clients.

Virgil is joined on the podcast by Brian Hansen, executive director of Spring Lake Ranch. Brian is uniquely qualified to comment on what it takes for organizations and individuals to recover from a crisis or disaster. In this episode, he shared that while organizations are really good at scaling back during a crisis, it's what happens after the initial shock - the slow and careful return to normal life - that is critical to ongoing stability.

In a second conversation in this special series, Virgil spoke with Ross Ellenhorn, PhD, founder of Ellenhorn, a program based in Boston, NYC, and North Carolina. Their conversation opens with much-needed humor and they go on to discuss the responsibility residential programs have to keep their residents safe right now. In addition, Virgil and Dr. Ellenhorn discuss the following topics: Whether Ellenhorn is continuing with admissions - Focusing the therapeutic work on maintaining psychological health and stability - How crisis gets us to think more about the welfare of others - How having a  common enemy (the virus) unites people - How social distancing is calling us to organize ourselves and actually behave in very socially connected ways - The way this pandemic is forcing the mental health field to innovate by offering increased tele-health care - How Dr. Ellenhorn's staff are pulling together using virtual meetups to support one another and their clients - And lastly, Dr. Ellenhorn describes how emergence - a term that describes how species act in a pattern to protect themselves and their most vulnerable - is occurring all around the world right now and we're "flying together in flock" more today than before this crisis

Virgil speaks with Eric Levine, EdD, Executive Director of CooperRiis Healing Community in North Carolina, about how residential treatment programs can best respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this short, special episode Eric talks about the importance of leaders exhibiting patience, courage, and kindness during difficult times in order to create and maintain a safe and healthy therapeutic community.