The FAMCare Blog

A social worker from Kentucky who corresponds with this blog on a regular basis recently shared her unique journey with us. She started her career as a case worker in the Veterans Administration helping vets find housing and manage addictive behaviors. After only a year on the job, she felt the need to continue her education and got her degree in psychotherapy while working full time at the VA. She began to specialize in cases of PTSD and eventually was introduced to a unique therapy known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. 

Social workers, especially those specializing in counseling and psychotherapy often lean toward a career in private practice.

“I absolutely love being in private practice, everything about it,” says Barbara Groves, LCSW, who has a private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia. “The flexibility, for example, to write off copays for motivated single working moms and students from low-income homes. The variety of patients in racial, socioeconomic, and spiritual orientation, as well as gender and political affiliation is so rewarding to me. I feel that I make a difference every day in helping patients become more self-aware and to become enlightened stewards of their lives.” (The Challenges of Private Practice by Sue Coyle, MSW, Social Work Today, Vol. 23 No. 3 P. 10)

Effective case management is an essential aspect of providing high-quality patient care. The role of case management has expanded and adapted to meet the ever-growing needs of healthcare settings, especially in mental health. To truly elevate your care and meet the demands of modern healthcare, it's crucial to implement best practices for case management. In this blog post, we'll explore the key principles and strategies that can make a difference in delivering top-notch care to mental health clients and patients.

Research from the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year. As more people seek treatment for their mental illnesses, behavioral disorders and emotional hardships, the need for qualified mental health professionals is booming, and the social worker’s role in actively supporting the mental health of individuals has become a vital part of the modern mental health care tableaux.

Maintaining compliance with legal criteria is crucial in the field of mental health case management. Caseworkers are essential in ensuring that clients receive the right assistance and services while adhering to legal and ethical guidelines. 

Caseworkers now have strong tools at their disposal to increase compliance and raise the standard of treatment overall thanks to developments in human services and mental health case management software. This article will examine methods for avoiding compliance problems while maximizing the advantages of human services and mental health case management software.

Mental health issues have been identified in more than 50 million Americans. The most prevalent mental ailment among Americans is depression, but they also have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. 

Due to the vast amount of mental health difficulties that the American populace is dealing with, case managers for mental health are in high demand. Every day to help their patients, these staff members, who usually work in psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centers, nonprofits, and public mental health institutions, go through mental health case management procedures.

Did you know that according to statistics, around one billion individuals worldwide suffer from mental health illnesses? Unfortunately, these figures are rising by the day. Such alarming statistics highlight the growing need for mental healthcare professionals to increase their efficacy and improve mental healthcare.  Let's look at some suggestions that can help mental healthcare providers improve the quality of their services.  

Steve Jobs famously said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” We are only now beginning to understand to what degree the digital revolution that he inspired has changed the world.

During the COVID pandemic social workers became concerned with the country’s mental health, especially the teenage population. They initiated a new (988) mental health crisis hotline and immediately began to receive significantly more calls in August 2022 than they had received in August 2021 on the old 10-digit suicide prevention line it replaced. The 988 number received 216,000 calls in August 2022, compared with 141,400 calls to the old number in August 2021. The new crisis line also received 39,900 texts, compared with 3,400 to the old crisis line.

NARCAN® Nasal Spray has been approved by the FDA as an over-the-counter treatment. 

In February this blog reported on the public health crisis of opioid addiction and the dramatic spike in sudden deaths by overdose caused primarily by the widespread use of synthetic fentanyl.

FAMCare Blog - February 7, 2023

“Opioid addiction is here to stay,” said a social work professor we interviewed. “However, we do have treatment for this particular addiction. But as long as we turn away from the horrors of this widespread addiction and choose to remain in denial, we will not make a concerted effort to widely administer treatment. The pharmaceutical industry has already created both long term treatments and emergency life-saving medications that are simply not being administered on a wide enough scale. I believe that a nationwide effort to make these medications available to anyone trapped in this particular substance abuse disorder should be a number-one priority for the social work profession at large.”

Drug overdose persists as a major public health issue in the United States, with more than 101,750 reported fatal overdoses occurring in the 12-month period ending in October 2022, primarily driven by synthetic opioids like illicit fentanyl.