COVID-19 will forever be remembered for quarantining, working from home and generally isolating from the world.
Today, many of us sit in our homes, at our computers, with children to be educated, pets to be soothed and chaos to be tolerated.
For decades, mental health has been a taboo topic.
We can talk about a family member’s cancer, for example, but not about the depression that keeps a loved one from going to work or the anxiety that makes it difficult for that person to leave the house.
Resilience is important to good mental health and wellbeing.
It helps us to overcome adversity in general and, more specifically, mental health challenges, including substance use disorders. All of us, at some point in our lives, need to tap into resiliency to overcome one obstacle or another.
Catastrophes, including public health emergencies such as COVID-19, affect mental health, both at the individual and population levels.
Indeed, people experience a wide range of mental health issues during and long after emergencies, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The new year brings excellent news for Beacon Health Options (Beacon).
Mental Health America (MHA) has awarded Beacon its platinum certification for The Bell Seal for Workplace Mental Health, MHA’s new national employer certification program.
In a continued effort to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, Beacon Health Options has partnered with Walmart on the opening of their second Walmart Health center, located in Calhoun, GA.
Beacon Care Services, a subsidiary of Beacon Health Options, will provide behavioral and mental health care, including individual, couples, group and family counseling to consumers, aged 6 and up, to address mild-to-moderate mental health issues.
Crises such as the nation’s current opioid epidemic call for clinical innovation combined with experience that has proven to be effective.
At Beacon Health Options, we tapped into both to create the Massachusetts Consultation Service for Treatment of Addiction and Pain (MCSTAP) to help primary care providers (PCPs) treat patients with chronic pain and/or substance use disorder (SUD).
There are several critical factors that have contributed to the rising demand for crisis services: reliance on emergency departments and law enforcement as the de facto crisis system, high suicide rates, stigma around mental illness, inadequate access to behavioral health care, and a relentless opioid epidemic.
As part of our ongoing, in-depth look at that those factors, today Beacon Lens will focus on suicide.
The need for behavioral health crisis services in the United States has never been stronger.
Traumatic national catastrophes, such as mass shootings, are on the rise. The opioid epidemic shows no signs of abating. The stigma around accessing mental health services persists. Suicide rates are high and rising. Access to mental health services remains elusive for many Americans.