COSIG CONFERENCE BROCHURE.pdf - Drexel University College ...

COSIG Co-Occurring Disorders Conference, Hershey PA, May 15-17, 2006
Identifying Mental Health “Issues”
Among the Interns
• Interns examined their own identifications during the
course of the training.
– Discussing in weekly supervision which patients they
identified with or avoided: “favorite” vs. “difficult”
patients.
• Some interns experienced a “mental health epiphany”
during the Internship.
– E.g., some realized they had “always been
depressed,” “depression is why I can’t recover from
the drugs issue,” “if I don’t get some mental health
support I could relapse.”
• A few Interns experienced a mental health crisis or
significant drug relapse and withdrew from the program.
Valuing Mental Health,
De-Stigmatizing Mental Illness
• “Take that back to your program.”
– The Internship encouraged Interns to seek mental
health services at their drug treatment facilities.
• “There’s no shame in being MICA.”
– Interns adopted a non-stigmatizing view of mental
illness, even among their drug recovery peers.
• “So now you got two recoveries.”
– Some Interns started “Double Trouble” groups on
their wards.
From a Culture of Conformity to a
Community of Care and Concern
• As Interns personalized their awareness of mental health
issues, Interns informally supervised each others’
“issues” on the wards.
– Interns at first assumed the house-managing roles
they had held at their drug treatment facilities; keeping
this up over time was seen as “being fake”.
– Inappropriate or inauthentic behavior was seen as
possibly having roots in “mental health issues you ain’t
looked at.”
– “You okay?” became a shared greeting among
Interns, with expectations for a dual response
addressing drug abstinence and emotional stability.
“That’s Deep.”
• As each cycle of Interns began to encounter and recognize
their own “mental health issues,” their roles on the wards
began to focus more on the patients’ needs for support rather
than just focusing on impulse control and behavioral change.
– Promoting a notion of patients as “deserving” support
– Feeling more comfortable “just listening”
– Attending to what patients could actually grasp
– Stepping out of the “drug recovery lingo” and “being
real”
– Networking with the treatment team to advocate for
patients
Parallel/Process Outcomes of the
“MICA Internship” Approach
• In this “MICA” context, the Interns came to see drug abstinence
as only one aspect of maintaining one’s drug recovery.
Who are the APCIP interns?
Where do they come from?
Where do they stop on the way to where they are going?
• Learning to see the complexities of the patients’ needs allowed
the Interns to see and accept the wide range of their own
needs.
• For Interns largely subject to population approaches to drug
treatment, drug recovery became a personal journey, anchored
in the self rather than in behavior.
Carmelo Romeo, M.S. (CRC)
Treatment Team Leader,
Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center
®
© 2006, Dual Diagnosis Resources and Research, LLC.
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