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

COSIG Co-Occurring Disorders Conference, Hershey PA, May 15-17, 2006
MORE APCIP HISTORY
• The Addiction Psychiatry Counseling Internship Project was
developed as a local response at BPC to New York State Office of Mental
Health (OMH) recognizing that co-occurring substance abuse, within the
mentally ill population it served, was so prevalent that separate services
for the dually diagnosed was an untenable approach to care.
• Almost 80% of BPC’s newly admitted mentally ill clients had co-occurring
drug/alcohol problems and it was clear that substance abuse treatment
services needed to be available in almost all treatment venues.
• Our core concept was to prepare individuals in advanced substance abuse
recovery for competitive employment in the growing number of entry level
jobs in group homes and similar community care settings, and along the
way, have these recovering counseling students contribute to the clinical
care teams where they trained.
APCIP’s Message to Referring Clinicians
• We remember a time when we had meeting after meeting
about whether a client was ready to move to the next level of
treatment, not about the pressure to move them out to free up
a bed or a treatment slot for someone in worse shape.
• We remember when we had time, to let a client go slow, so
that we could be there for them when the hard times from the
past made themselves felt once again, now that street
anesthesia was out of the way.
• We remember, but our boss is calling, our phone is ringing,
three clients are outside our door, our beeper is going off, and
our unopened e-mail looks like a new dictionary.
APCIP’s Message to Program Management
• The Addiction Psychiatry Counseling Internship Project
( APCIP) at Bronx Psychiatric Center gives you and your client a
choice regarding your client’s movement toward aftercare while
maintaining intense involvement with a therapeutic system.
• APCIP teaches your client substance abuse counseling and
counselor self-awareness in the context of comorbid major mental
illness and other treatment complications (trauma history, medical
illness and disability, cognitive disability and traumatic brain injury,
etc.)
• Your client begins to learn about working with clients, about safety
and risk, about how a clinical team sorts through concurrent
illnesses, about how clinicians deal with their stress and the stress
faced by their colleagues.
More for Program Managers
• Your client also faces the longing of people in treatment to go
home, to get out of the hospital, to be in their own apartment or
back with their family. They work with this longing no matter
how unrealistic it is at a given moment in time, no matter how
much damage acting out such longing can do to carefully
planned treatment and rehabilitation efforts, no matter how
much of a threat it poses in terms of relapse or
decompensation.
• If the client you are seeing will benefit from this kind of
exposure, from looking in the mirror of working with those in
even greater need, then consider APCIP as an alternative. If
your client is someone who has what it takes to give something
back as a helping professional, help us in preparing your client
for what we all know is the difficult road ahead.
APCIP’s Message to Recovering Candidates:
A Career Opportunity for People in Recovery
• The benefits of recovering role models helping others is
not just a program concept, but a researched and
documented successful approach to both rehabilitation
and recovery.
• In the Bronx Psychiatric Center Addiction Psychiatry
Counseling Internship Project (APCIP) your
knowledge of recovery and the dangers of relapse are
the starting point for a program that puts you on the front
lines of working with people who have faced the
challenges of both mental illness and substance abuse.
More for Recovering Candidates
• As you may choose to learn, APCIP is a lot more than just a
training program. It is preparation for you and the dually
diagnosed clients you will learn to serve, to re-engage the world
with:
– deeper understanding of both substance abuse and mental
illness in the context of the physical health, mental health,
and social health issues all people face,
– redefinition of recovery, not as something you go through,
but as something that goes through you, something that
moves beyond the oversimplification of using or not using
and brings you to choices about living, learning, working,
and playing.
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