Honoring Social Workers

by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Mar 14, 2018 | Blog

March is National Professional Social Work Month, with this year’s theme “Social Workers: Leaders. Advocates. Champions.” We thought it would be a good time to acknowledge and celebrate the many contributions these caring professionals provide to our communities.

First off, a statistic. In the United States, there are approximately 650,000 social workers, and they work in varied settings including hospitals, community mental health organizations and private practices, among others.

They also play a wide variety of roles. Some specialize in clinical work, which means providing counseling/therapy. Some focus on working with a specific population, such as veterans or children or senior citizens. Some work advocating for policy changes and social and economic justice issues in the halls of Washington or local/regional political realms.

At North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, our social workers are versatile and perform a combination of clinical, prevention and outreach services. They operate out of our headquarters and two branch offices as well three schools and provide home visits for select families with vulnerable children that might not participate in traditional office-based mental health care.

Whatever their specialty, all social workers are bound by the NASW Code of Ethics, which calls on members of the profession “to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed and living in poverty.”

“With government rolling back funding on so many programs, the advocacy aspect of social workers is more important than ever,” says Andrew Malekoff, Executive Director at the Guidance Center. “The protections that came with the Affordable Care Act are in jeopardy, so we must advocate for the funding to remain for the services that our clients need.”

One of our longtime social workers is Amy Ipp-Gelb, MSW, who is the Clinical Coordinator at the BOCES Middle School in Hicksville, where the Guidance Center provides in-school mental health services to students in our Intensive Support Program (ISP). Each year Amy honors Social Work month with a dedication at the school where she has worked since 2001.

“Many of our students stay with us from 6^th to 9^th grades, and then either move to our High School ISP site in Wantagh or go back to their district. We see them every day, providing mental health services in school. We see them through good days and bad days. We get to know their parents and families, too.

It’s a job that Gelb truly loves. “Over the years, there’s real transformational physical and emotional growth in these young people. The reward is phenomenal.”

We thank all the social workers and other professionals in our agency and throughout the nation. They are true life-savers.

Sources:

www.socialworkers.org/

Profile: Regina Barros-Rivera

by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Mar 8, 2018 | Blog

March 8th marks the celebration of International Women’s Day, and at North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, we are lucky and proud that our Associate Executive Director is a woman well worth celebrating.

Barros-Rivera received her Masters in Social Work from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1980.  Since acquiring her degree she has been dedicated to working with children, youth and families who have been impacted by psychosocial stressors such as high poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and trauma. 

She directly supervises multiple programs and staff at the Guidance Center and has been in an administrative position with us since 1989, when she was hired to develop and implement Drug and Alcohol treatment services for the agency. One of the programs she supervises is the Intensive Support Program, a collaborative effort developed by Nassau B.O.C.E.S and the Guidance Center that provides a therapeutic and nurturing alternative, offering intensive mental health services onsite at three schools for students ages 5-21 from all 56 Nassau County school districts.

As a bicultural and bilingual mental health professional, Barros-Rivera is particularly sensitive to the special needs of the immigrant Latino family, and she has worked diligently to implement culturally appropriate services that provide quality care for that population.

One example is her founding and development of the Guidance Center’s Latina Girls Project, an innovative program that employs individual, group and family therapy, along with monthly outings and other activities, to help first-generation Latina teens. She both supervises this program and also works directly with the teenagers, helping them overcome anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and cultural conflicts within their families.

Andrew Malekoff, Executive Director and CEO of the Guidance Center, says Barros-Rivera’s contribution to the organization is critical to our success. “Regina is involved on every level, from conducting client therapy with individual, families and groups to creating innovative programs that have helped heal thousands of children, teens and families,” he says.

Last year, Barros-Rivera was honored at the 2017 “What’s Great in Our State—A Celebration of Children’s Mental Health Awareness” for her leadership role in the organization. The event honors individuals and programs that are successfully addressing the issues of children’s mental health, including work on early identification, outreach, family education and providing mental health awareness in schools.

On this International Women’s Day, we thank Regina Barros-Rivera for being a champion for children, teens and families who come to us seeking help. To them, she is a true heroine.

Dispelling the Myths on Mental Illness and Violence

by North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center | Mar 1, 2018 | Blog

The tragedy in Parkland, Florida has once again brought up the conversation about violence and mental illness. It’s not surprising: After all, how could a “sane” person commit such a heinous act as the murder of 17 students and teachers?

The leadership of the National Rifle Association wants to focus the conversation on the idea that Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. When they say that those “people” who commit violence acts such as the one in Parkland are mentally ill, their conclusion is, then, that it really has nothing to do with guns.

The truth is that all sorts of people with guns kill people. And they are not primarily people diagnosed with mental illness.

As North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center’s Executive Director, Andrew Malekoff, wrote in a recent column, “It is incredibly rare for those who are labeled as mentally ill to be violent. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.”

The idea of making mental health counseling a top priority in this country is certainly a concept that any mental health professional would support, but not because most of those labeled as mentally ill are dangerous. The statistics on mental illness and violence tell a very different story. Here are a few:

• Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In contrast, deaths by suicide using firearms account for the majority of yearly gun-related deaths.
• According to the National Center for Health Statistics, fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with a mental illness.
• Only 3 to 5 percent of all violence, including but not limited to firearm violence, is attributable to serious mental illness.  
• Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that suicide, not homicide, is the most significant public health concern in terms of guns and mental illness.
• People with severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychosis are 2 ½ times more likely to be attacked, raped or mugged than the general population.

As for the issue of whether stricter gun control laws can help prevent such tragedies, perhaps the most poignant and powerful comments came from Emma Gonzales, a student survivor from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: “Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”

To Emma’s list, we add: Blaming those who have mental illness for all acts of gun violence and mass shootings. We call B.S.

Sources:

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099

https://northshorechildguidance.org/parkland-youth-activism-triumph-helplessness-despair/

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11585953

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242

http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php

http://www.amhca.org/blogs/joel-miller/2017/10/03/gun-violence-and-mental-illnessmyths-and-evidence-based-facts