Psychosis And Early Intervention With Catherine Adams

 

In the vast field of mental health and mental illness, the term “psychosis” and the experience of living with such mental illness has been continually stigmatized in society because of the lack of knowledge surrounding it. But things are changing, and intervention for psychosis has become much more holistic as the stigmas associated with psychosis are being dismantled. Catherine Adams is a Senior Clinician who specializes in early intervention following first episodes of psychosis. Timothy J. Hayes interviews Catherine about her work regarding psychosis, especially as the Owner and Clinical Director of ETCH, or Early Treatment and Cognitive Health. Learn more about the new methods for psychosis intervention today!

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Psychosis And Early Intervention With Catherine Adams

My next guest is Catherine Adams. Catherine received her MSW from Michigan State University. She worked for over 30 years for the Clinton, Eaton, Ingham County Mental Health Board in Lansing, Michigan. She worked as a Senior Clinician and Clinical Manager serving consumers with mental illness and their families. Miss Adams has served as Project Director for multiple national research endeavors, exploring the benefits of early intervention following the first episode of psychosis. Miss Adams is also the Owner and Clinical Director of ETCH, Early Treatment in Cognitive Health, which provides raise navigate coordinated specialty care interventions to young adults experiencing the first episode of psychosis and their families. Miss Adams is the consultant trainer for the First Episode Psychosis Programs in the State of Michigan.

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Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for this opportunity to chat with you about this important topic.

Let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this field.

I did want to make a quick mention that Journey and his family are important to me and it’s meaningful that Journey has brought us to this conversation. I feel this will allow us an opportunity to expand our understanding and our awareness about the topic we’re going to talk about. Also, my hope is to increase access and opportunity to people who might be struggling with mental health distress. My career is longer than I would like to admit. It’s over 30-plus years working in mental health. Most of that time is spent working with people who’ve experienced some fairly serious disruption in their lives related to a mental health experience. In the last years, that’s what I’m most involved in now. I’ve been engaged in work that is specific to intervening early with young people who may be experiencing psychosis.

That’s a critically important topic. As I understand it, little is known about it in the general public.

What we’re up against in most areas is when we think about mental health, the stigma and the way that mental health challenges are portrayed in media and other venues have led us to go into the shadows with this. It’s not allowed us to openly come forward and speak our truth about things we may be experiencing. With the efforts, I would say beginning in 2008 in some parts of the country and taking on some steam in 2010 and beyond in the United States, with an emphasis on intervening early with young adults who are experiencing psychosis. I like to always share a little bit about some of the statistics that make it so important. Some of those things are the fact that there are approximately 100,000 youth and young adults experiencing psychosis each year. I’d like to think about that as a per-day number so it’s 274 young people per day.

I happen to hail from East Lansing. I’m across the street from Michigan State. When I’m talking to young people and their families, I like to bring it into a perspective that maybe makes sense and can be a little personal. Over at MSU campus, there are now maybe 45,000 young people over there, enrolled in some academic path. If you use that math that I used, 3 out of every 100 young people is a statistic we use. That would equate to 1,200 to 1,500 young people over on MSU’s campus now. It’s important to understand that this is a more common experience than we know. One of the ways in which we’ve lost ourselves in the US is people are waiting up to two years or more to get support and to have an identification that would lead to some supports around what their experience was.

77% of people experiencing psychosis will have some relief of symptoms with medication. Click To Tweet

Systems of care were waiting for people to come to them and we’re making huge strides in that way. The World Health Organization recommends that the wait be no longer than twelve weeks that you’re going to have the most impact and efficacy if you’re able to partner with people and bring support to bear within twelve weeks of identifying this experience. Another disparaging statistic is that three times as many young people who have experienced psychosis will drop out of school compared to their peers. Imagine the time of life when people are most often experiencing the first episode of psychosis and that is usually somewhere in the range of age fifteen, mid-teens to early 30s.

That’s a time in life when people are on a path to discovering themselves, to imagining their next steps in their lives, to emancipating and individuating from families. This happens at a time when it can lead people to lose their way and move away from some of those important developmental tasks. We also think that most experiences like this begin before the age of 24. As I mentioned, 15 to 30 is the age range of eligibility for our program. Half of those young people don’t get help when they need it. The result of all this can be a downward impact such as school dropout, incarceration, homelessness and sadly, suicide, which is the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults.

What’s important to know though is intervention works. We’re excited about this intervention. I like to think about it as a revolution of hope. I know I didn’t coin the phrase but it applies to this experience in the United States. We’ve gone from ten sites back in the mid-2000s to nearing over 200 programs, maybe a little off on that statistic, that could provide this coordinated and holistic support to young people in their families. We know that medications can be part of remission for young people. About 77% of people experiencing psychosis will have some relief of symptoms with medication but 2/3 of those people will not experience recoveries in functional ways in the areas of their social lives, school, and work. That’s the response of this program. It’s to bring support in all those domains and to understand that there’s a whole person there that needs support in many ways, not only the traditional.

Did you say that 2/3 of the people that get medication support for their psychosis don’t recover in functional ways?

They don’t have as robust recovery frequently in the areas of work, school and social domains.

That would mean it would be important to develop a robust comprehensive way to support people who have that. From my own personal experience, it’s not a terminal illness. Many people recover from a psychotic episode and get back to full active lives. It can’t be that 2/3 of the people who have this don’t have a chance to recover. That’s the issue. If all they’re getting is medication support, it’s not enough.

I would think we are experienced with support and competencies in the mix in terms of things that people can choose from and that makes sense to them at this time in their life and particular experience. We often see that momentum and traction is happening in all kinds of important domains in a young person’s life. This model is considered what we refer to as a Coordinated Specialty Care Model, meaning it coordinates several specialties and brings those to the table for a young person in their family. The different competencies on our team and the different things that would be offered in this early support would be individualized therapy. That’s a one-to-one relationship that you would form with a therapist. What’s different about that and what speaks to me about it is it has a lot of emphasis on positive psychology, resilience and this idea that within all of us exists an inherent resilience. There’s a strength that we draw upon. There’s a well that we dip our cup into when we’re facing difficulty in our lives and that exists there.

If we can shine a brighter light on that when people are experiencing distress and despair, they can bring those inherent qualities to bear and to support their wellness. The individual therapy support is much a strength-based resiliency focused intervention. There is also some emphasis on skills and what are the tools that work and individualized to you and how you manage when you’re experiencing heightened distress or stress. We all face stress in our everyday lives and we need to have tools that help us soothe ourselves and ease those different stresses.

 

The individual therapy intervention would also offer those things and tailored to what the young person identifies as useful, important and congruent with their values for themselves and their lives. That’s a big piece of the support that’s available. Another piece is family support because as you might imagine, when you love someone and you see them going through this difficulty or crisis, you can feel bewildered, lost and alone. We offer support to families if the young person wants to include significant people in their lives be it biological relatives or other natural supports in their lives. We find it meaningful and powerful to gather together and to bring all that wisdom into one place. Family has the wisdom that we as a treatment entity don’t have access to. We’re looking to families for some of that wisdom and guidance.

We also find that going through some of these distresses has a strong impact on families and it can be helpful to ground everybody again in a shared understanding of what’s going on. What information is helpful? What is missing? What do people want to know more about? How can they be helpful? How is communication working for the family? Are there ways to strengthen it or enhance how things are going? We hope that a young person will be receptive to that. Part of this support is involving their family and getting everybody together to find that sweet spot that helps a young person thrive. This is happening at a time when probably every fiber in a young person’s body is saying, “Separate, emancipate, move away from parents and resist that authority.” A crisis happens and it’s the natural response of parents.

When you love someone to come closer to them when they’re in crisis, I always think about it as a safety net that you’ve lowered as your young person is getting ready to launch gets brought way back up again. That can create some tensions. Helping everyone understand that phenomena and figure out how to help a young person get back to manifesting some of that natural developmental impulse is helpful. The family support is a big part of it. Another important part, which tends to be something that young people find most appealing, is we have a team member who provides support about work and school goals.

Typically, this is occurring for a young person when they might be in the midst of completing high school, thinking about what’s after high school, about a job or having a job. Especially if something like a hospitalization is involved during the crisis period. Someone has gone on a bit of a detour and helping them figure out how to find their way back. Do they want to find their way back? Do they want to brainstorm a little bit about what they’re imagining for themselves? What are they curious about where they see themselves next? Bringing supported around work and school or other next step visions that People have for themselves is important.

There are two more members of the team. There is psychiatry and what I like to emphasize here is that the psychiatric approach and my 30-plus years of working in this field and working a lot with psychiatry, I find the approach in this intervention is different. It rests in this place of a practice called shared decision making. Any of us who’ve been to a physician can relate to this hierarchy that quietly exists. A doctor is a person with knowing and we don’t have the knowing so the knowing is imparted on us. We try to level that playing field and say that we’re all in this together. We all have different wisdom and expertise that we bring to it. The doctor, the young person, family and one of us on the team might have some wisdom. We bring that all into space where hopefully, there’s a real rich complete conversation that can happen around medications and whether they will or will not play a role in the person’s recovery and wellness.

How much of a role? Historically, in our culture, the idea is if something happens that’s far out of our experience, we go to the doctor and we say, “Throw something at this. Fix this.” If all the doctor has in his or her toolkit is medication, that’s all that happens. As you were saying, you’ve learned and the research indicates that a multi-faceted approach is best for the outcome.

I would wholeheartedly agree with that. For me, personally, I suppose I’ve learned that I didn’t resist an impulse to over medicalize the experience to understand that serves a lot of things that contribute. We have to be cautious not to make the brain the enemy. We have to be cautious to understand that there’s a lot of things that might go into a person’s experience and there’s a lot of mystery and things we maybe need to seek to understand. This approach and our doctors here are especially good at being collaborative about medications and what that experience is like, what side effects might there be, what other stigma-related factors get brought into the person’s experience. Also, how to try to be fully inviting that conversation from the young person.

If we make it so it’s only about medications and treating it in that way, we’ve conveyed powerlessness. It’s something happening in your brain and therefore I worry that we convey futility and there’ll be a loss of hope and motivation if we villainize our brain. I like the approach because it has a balanced understanding that there are lots of things that might be important in supporting someone in understanding what’s happening and cultivating wellness in their life.

Doctors need to be more collaborative about the experience of medication, especially side effects and symptoms. Click To Tweet

You mentioned there were two more team members. One of them is psychiatry and what’s the other one?

The other one is newer to our teams in Michigan. Nationally, there’s a real impetus now to bring peers to our teams. Peers are people who have had a similar experience in their own lives and have journeyed with it and have manifested some wellness. They have tools, ideas and ways of understanding it. Quite frankly, if you haven’t experienced it, you can’t operate from that same space. A peer, someone with lived experience has a unique ability to connect with a person in a different way than all the other team members can.

We’re excited that our teams across the country are bringing peers into the experience not only peers with lived experience but in some states, it’s something new or even that we’re trying what’s called Family Peers or Family Partners. A family who’s been through something with somebody they care about, who maybe can identify and resonate with a family who’s at the front end of it or starting the experience. It’s different. I feel that I’m a person with a lot of capacity for empathy but can I relate in that way as a person who’s lived it or who maybe has had a voice-hearing experience or something like that? Maybe I haven’t had that in the same way as appear can relate to that with a young person who’s going through that or something similar.

The same thing holds for the family. If you’ve had a family member go through an experience like that, you are a valuable resource to other families who have that happened. There’s a level of the shock value and getting over it. If you’ve never been through a psychotic episode with somebody, it’s terrifying because you have no concept, no way to contain what you’re experiencing or what the other person is experiencing. That’s why we see families being useful in supporting other families through a process like this.

I’m excited about that and to bring at least into the sphere, some of the challenges with financing the in this world of this intervention there isn’t reimbursement in most ways for peers or family partners. There is for peers under Medicaid. Those are areas I don’t want to spend a lot of time with that. I mostly want to talk about this set of supports and how we think it can be helpful to get young people to the supports early. We can’t neglect that we need to make bigger changes in terms of how things are funded in the healthcare system.

I remember you said something about a program and had an acronym and there was some research saying that it was quite effective. However, the research also said when that support was drawn, the results disappeared and you were working on a program that would have that continuing support.

A lot of programs across the country are starting to recognize that we have to think about how to support the transition from these more intensive interventions. These interventions are fairly intensive at the beginning and we have to do a better job of figuring out what helps people step away from the community they have within this program to a community that they create outside of these walls. You and I spoke about this in one of our earlier conversations, I am excited about getting in touch with this idea that belonging is important to us as human beings. This experience of psychosis, however, manifests for a person who can be isolating. You mentioned that for families as well. It can be isolating for families. There’s a real disconnect.

There’s a woman who is part of NAMI. She started the NAMI Family to Family many years ago. She always said that mental illness is the only illness for which nobody brings you a covered casserole. That’s so true. There’s so much isolation when someone you know is going through mental health distress or crisis. We lay low and we step away. There’s a lot of isolation. We wanted to come up with something that would help people gather up all this strength that they’ve manifested for themselves and built for themselves in their collaboration with us. Also, figure out how to take that into their lives where they build some community with people where they live.

 

We started a program and we’re calling it NAV2Go. The overall program I’ve been talking about thus far is called Navigate. It’s a coordinated specialty care program. It’s a model that’s widespread across the United States and we are doing a program here called NAV2Go. We’re working with people who have a lot of footing back in their lives and things that were important to them be at school, relationships, faith community or whatever it was there. They’ve started to reach outside of here and connect with those things and we want to figure out how to concretize that and make that solid for people.

It’s natural that as things are getting back on track for people, they’ll need us less so we want to make sure we do a good job with that transition. As you mentioned, there has been some research to suggest that when the coordinate specialty care services are pulled back, that people may have a hard time sustaining the gains that they made during the intervention or the support. We’re trying to understand that better and it’s not only us there are people all across the country looking hard at that and seeing what we can learn and understand about how to be most helpful.

It brought to mind Dr. Mark Hyman, who talks about this recipe for a healthy life. It’s not rocket science. There are these 5, 7 or 8 different factors. Food, water, sleep, and exercise are the usual ones that people think about. In that, he goes on to say, “Love, a sense of purpose in life and connection to the community.” These are critical aspects that if we take a one-prong approach to a problem, whether it’s the physical or the occupational, we miss that bigger picture of support, which allows most of us to carve out a life that we enjoy or have some sense of fulfillment in.

I’ve become more keenly aware of it in my own life and in my work life that we can’t neglect that. We need to understand what’s essential.

I have spoken to and interviewed a young woman who ended up going through her own long mental health adventure. She talks about it as having been transformative with the proper support with her intelligence, and she’s all decidedly above-average intelligence. The issue is when I have a mental health challenge, it isn’t the end of my life or my career as we’ve been taught to believe so often. People of my age, the stigma against mental health is the only disease process where the community hasn’t come together and support your family and bring you a potluck. The idea that not only is it not this end of everything I had hoped for, it can be something that I use and my support team might use to help me create a whole different life that I never imagined before.

To that point, it’s something that I’ve loved about this ten-year chapter in my career. I have to give a nod to Michigan because our leadership in Michigan has allowed us to start with this core support called Navigate which is a strong foundation and strong evidence base supports. Also, a great team nationally to pull from if needed. Within Michigan, we’ve added some things toward that end that these people are we as humans are multifaceted. We have all different ways of understanding our experience. We’ve added some things to our intervention here that have been helpful. We’ve added something called CBTP. That stands for Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Psychosis.

I neglected to mention at the head of this, I apologize. When you think about psychosis, what are we talking about? We’re talking about a couple of things when we think about the nomenclature that we use. We’re talking about a shift in people’s experience around how information is processed. Information comes in and how it’s processed may feel different and may include an experience of voice-hearing or some perceptual, visual, olfactory or tactile experience. It’s so some change in the nomenclature used for that is a hallucination.

Another factor would be a strong fixed set of beliefs that others don’t share. It doesn’t feel it’s resting and a shared reality because there’s a lot of objection to it or denial of it from the outside world. People might have a strong belief or a strong understanding of what is going on for them. That, in the nomenclature, is referred to as delusional thinking. One of the other things that are especially hard for young people is there can be impacts in terms of cognition like how quickly you process information, memory, attention, focus and concentration. Those are some of the early things that even pre any kind of psychosis experience.

Trauma likely plays a large part in many patients' experiences of psychosis. Click To Tweet

Looking back, parents will often say, “Now that I look back, it felt like a teenager to me but there were some grades slipping and some difficulty with follow-through and things like that.” When we’re thinking about psychosis, those are the things we’re thinking about. CBPT for psychosis looks at those experiences and collaborates with a person to help them make meaning of them. For a long time, we thought that what a person believes strongly that got labeled as a delusion didn’t have any fit. It was random. Now, we understand so much better that it isn’t random. It’s based on probably some experience the person had that led to that formulation of that belief or that particular narrative in terms of what the voice-hearing experience is. There’s a meaning to be made of it.

CBPT aims to support people and creating meaning. Two things can happen as a result of that. One, people experienced less distress as a result of the psychosis experience. Two, it may become less of a barrier to things they want to accomplish in their lives because sometimes, the experience can be so distressing that it gets in the way of outcomes they imagined for themselves or basic functioning. CBPT, in addition to some of the skills and stuff that are part of the individual resiliency therapy that we talked about earlier, can manifest relieve some skill and ways of understanding. It isn’t that approach that wants to pry the thinking out of somebody’s hand and prove it false. That’s not helpful. Imagine if somebody came to you and said that, “You’re not the person who manages your own mind,” and tried to hammer you that the truth wasn’t your truth. You would get activated. You would want to defend that. When we’re trying to pry this way of thinking or understanding experience out of somebody’s hand basically, we’re only encouraging them to grip all our fears to it.

It creates a sense of dependence. If they buy into what I’m telling them that they can’t trust their perception, they become dependent upon other people. The whole point of it moving forward through a process that is to learn to manage and trust my perception again, learn to understand how it might have gotten a little bit off-target or even woven in some extra sensory perceptions that I didn’t have before. There are people who, and this would be the goal for most people that I work with, to help them learn to read their own perception and trust their own judgment. If they have an episode, like the ones you’re talking about, one of the things that happen is they start questioning their own perception.

The CBPT, I love the blend that we have in our programs because we have the IRT. We’re honing in on the strengths of resilient qualities.

What does IRT stand for?

Individual Resiliency Training. That’s the individual strength phase positive psychology approach and we added the CBPT to that. It’s coming up and I’m excited about it. We’re going to be adding Compassion Focus Therapy. We’re having a trainer, Charlie Hariot-Maitland come and train us in that. I had a two-day training with him. That was appealing to me because it is about developing a compassionate self. A lot of times when people are experiencing this and they may be faltering in certain parts of their life, there’s a real tendency to get self-deprecating, self-stigmatize and to get bound up in shame.

This Compassionate Focus Therapy is about how you cultivate a compassionate self. Thereby bring on your ability to soothe yourself and to get back in touch with your drive system, which is about relationships, goals, and connectedness. Your threat system, which might be experienced as voice-hearing or worrisome thoughts about the intentions of other people. That system the thread system gets so large, that it crowds out our ability to have a drive and to soothe. Compassion Focus Therapy, all of our Michigan folks are going to get trained in how to bring that to the relationships with people. I’m excited about that in May of 2020.

I get to that issue, I so often tell people, Sylvia Boorstein was interviewed and she’s this Jewish, Buddhist grandmotherly type person. She said, “When I feel upset, I put my hand over my heart space and I talk gently to myself. I say, ‘Timmy, sweetheart, you’re in pain. Take a few deep breaths and we’ll calm down. After we relaxed a little bit and the pain waves are gone, we’ll look at what’s going on and we’ll decide what to do. For now, Timmy, you’re in pain.’” This compassionate approach to this be gentle with yourself is something that I push with people because if I can’t have it for myself, I can’t have it for others. If I can’t have that gentle approach with others, I can’t make that serious connection. Using my own skills in connection with others is the sense of community that Mark Hyman talks about. That gives me the strength to get through big episodes of change in my life.

 

I remember not too long ago, I had a person in therapy who came in. She went to this big stretch to do something she’d never done before a week-long program where she was going to be a counselor to camp somewhere. She came back and she said, “What I learned, much to my surprise, during this week was the more I asked for help, the stronger I felt.” In her entire life prior to that had been the opposite because she came through and not so healthy family situation. If she would ask for help, she would get ridiculed or attacked. In a healthy system, when we ask for help, we learn something, we feel stronger. That to me that’s tied in with that. I need to be gentle with myself. If I’m stuck and I beat myself up because I can’t figure it out, I robbed myself of the strength of being able to ask for help. When I asked for help in what I’m doing, I’m connecting with someone or something else inside of me. That can be the synergy for strength, which I like about the core of your program being this multifaceted approach, bringing in peers, different clinical experts and family support. It’s a fabulous thing.

To the point you were making, though about compassion itself, that’s one of the things that I like about this training, and we’re going to get this specialized version of it for people experiencing psychosis. It’s the receiving and the giving of compassion that you need to cultivate in yourself. It’s also compassion. Let’s say you have a voice-hearing experience and there’s a voice who’s pretty critical and says, “You’re going to fail at something.” It’s having compassion for that voice or that narrative that’s going on and saying, “I know you’re worried about me and you’re looking out for me but I’ve got this.” That’s taken directly from some work that Eleanor Longden and Charlie Harriot Maitland did on Compassion for Voices in particular.

It’s one of the core pieces of the internal family systems work where I get to recognize that whatever part, aspect of me or motivation within me is probably there for a good reason. It probably developed at a time when I was in a crisis and I needed to watch out for people with a booming voice, violent or people who could be emotionally abusive. At that point in my life, the only defense mechanisms I had were the real primitive ones of either attacking or shutting down. When that goes off in me when I’m an adult, it’s letting me know that there’s some situation here that needs some attention. If the only aspect or personal skills I have available to get motivated with that memory of this trauma are my primitive skills that are not so productive as an adult.

You mentioned the word, trauma. In the experience of psychosis, we’ve become more aware of the role that trauma likely plays in a large percent of the experience of psychosis. The CBPT and all of these different things we’ve been able to weave together takes a longitudinal look at what the story is that you were talking about these primitive bits of armor that got brought into play. What is the story that you have? We all have a bad story that we’re bringing to this moment.

Sometimes if we can understand what part of that backstory is bringing on a particular emotion, the intensity in voice-hearing or a particular line of thinking about, for example, somebody’s stealing my intellectual property from my heating system, or whatever the experience may be. That’s not to some random string of things that has a foundation in some earlier singular experience or earlier network of experiences. Your mind and psyche went to construct that for a reason. That’s what I think. I’ve seen people grab a powerful piece of having their own healing when they can understand that and make a few of those connections. We work to facilitate that for people who are interested in that.

You’ve mentioned your facility. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Is it inpatient and outpatient? How do people get access to you?

Across the country, almost all 50 states have these early intervention programs and even some states now have something called Clinical High Risk. We want to discover when people might be having difficulties even before a major crisis like hospitalization or something like that. There are all kinds of wonderful innovation going on across the country and the world. In Michigan, we have four sites for early intervention sites. Mine that I am the clinical director is here in East Lansing. We’re an outpatient model. We’re not an inpatient setting, though we do work closely with local inpatient facilities if that’s needed or if people are there. We’re trying to get them into our program so forth. We have a good collaboration with them. The four programs that exist in Michigan are in different parts of the state, and they’re all outpatient facilities. That’s how we’re structured here and most states are increasing their offering of this type of intervention. We’re working hard to do that.

Are there some aspects of what you do or you’re passionate about that I haven’t asked you about yet that you want to make sure we put in the interview?

We covered it but I want to give extra emphasis to this idea that we’re supporting a whole person here and we’ve operated a little narrowly in my history in mental health. I’m excited at the way that we’re expanding that. We offer all the things I talked about, but we also have a mindfulness coach that comes in and works with us as a team. It’s important. You’re in this profession, it’s important to cultivate our own wellness. We also have made that available to our young people. We did a family mindfulness workshop. We also offer a lot of community engagement activities to help people bridge from the support that they get here to community involvement.

We’re going to run a nutrition group. Our first one is in mid-March because there are some impacts, as you’re probably aware of that are related. They’re maybe some medication side-effects that affect health. Also, there are some impacts around motivation so that people who might have had certain healthy lifestyles things in place. They lose touch with some of that. We’re looking at ways to cultivate and restore that for people who are interested. We always try to resist imposing our agenda. We want people to self-actualize here and it’s not about what we think they need or what we think is best, but we want to offer them opportunities to put a toe in that water. What does that feel like? Is that something you want to pursue further? We have the wellness, we’re starting nutrition, we’ve been doing some yoga. We try to do some of these things through faith in locations in our community. We want to be out there in our community and use some of that presence to reduce the overall stigma. Also, to bring people closer to one another, so it’s your neighbors who you have some kinship with and it’s not only here that. You can get that in other parts of your life.

How do people find out more about you?

There are a couple of online resources. There’s something called PEPPNET, which is the early psychosis network and it has what they refer to it as a treatment tracker or something. It’s some United States tool that allows you to link in to see where a program is, depending on where you live. Another one of the websites that I love, and I follow them on their Facebook, and they help us design our website. It’s Strong365.org. Our website is MichiganMinds.org. Those are some good ways to find out if there’s a resource like this close to you.

I greatly appreciate your time and the work you’re doing. It’s quite a blessing to have people like you out there helping us. I look forward to our next contact.

Thank you, Timothy. I enjoyed this opportunity to talk with you about this. I’m passionate about it. It offers an opportunity to not have the devastating continually downward trend for people experiencing this. There’s so much hope and opportunity now.

Hope is here and you are part of bringing it to us. Thank you so much. I appreciate.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Take care.

 

Important Links

• Catherine Adams
• Clinton, Eaton, Ingham County Mental Health Board
• Early Treatment in Cognitive Health
• NAMI
• Navigate
• Dr. Mark Hyman
• Charlie Hariot-Maitland
• Eleanor Longden
• PEPPNET
• Facebook – Strong365
• Strong365.org
• MichiganMinds.org

 

About Catherine Adams

Catherine Adams, LMSW, ACSW, CAADC, received her MSW from Michigan State University. She worked for over 30 years for the Clinton-Eaton-Ingham Community Mental Health Board in Lansing, MI as a senior clinician and clinical manager serving consumers with mental illness and their families. Ms. Adams has served as Project Director for multiple national research endeavors exploring the benefits of early intervention following the first episode of psychosis.

Ms. Adams is also the Owner and Clinical Director of ETCH (Early Treatment and Cognitive Health) which provides RAISE-NAVIGATE Coordinated Specialty Care interventions to young adults experiencing a first episode of psychosis and their families. Ms. Adams is the Consultant/Trainer for First Episode Psychosis programs in the state of Michigan.

 

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