Welcome to Innovating in Organizations
What happens when we go to work? We carry all the burdens we do in our everyday lives — our hopes, dreams, failures, childhood and other traumas, and more. Work is not a magical place where we can just...
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5 Facts About Private and Organizational Trauma
Trauma: it’s in the news, in blogs, and on many minds. It’s either part of your history or the history of someone you know, someone you work for, or someone you work with. Trauma takes the forefront...
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5 Lessons of Gratitude and Light
Any culture rooted in agriculture is likely to have harvest festival—crops come in in early fall, slaughtering is best done when it’s cool, and people need community before the lean, cold winter...
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4 Challenges for the Model of Peer Support in Mental Illness Care
The mental health industry has a new pal: peer support, in which peers extend the services provided by mental health agencies. The model is similar to Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), which helped...
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How We Lost and are Fighting to Regain Carter’s Focus on Mental Health (not...
In the 70s there was a lot of to-do about prevention. I was caught up in the thick of it — this new paradigm of mental health that coincided with the President’s Commission on Mental Health formed by...
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Is There Anything We Shouldn’t Forgive?
Forgiveness is an opening. Image via Flickr JulieJordanScott cc license I was watching network news—the one with the eye for an icon, CBS, right? I heard a woman’s voice saying, “Is there anything in...
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The Politics of Healing: Dissociative Identity Disorder
It was the late 1990s. I sometimes got—and still get—calls from folks working with people who are highly dissociative, notably those diagnosed as having Multiple Personality Disorder. I’m saying...
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5 Things Mental Health Providers and Agencies can Learn About Being...
Mental health care providers face a Gordian knot: on one hand, they must perform well in terms of traditional business models — meet the numbers, make the financial targets and the margins required for...
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The Dangers of Coercive Mental Health Care
In a December 22, 2013 article for Bloomberg Opinion, psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Sally Satel, touts the recent Mental Health Crisis Act of 2013 (MCHA),...
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The Value of Sturdiness During Organizational Change
When I was a child, things were “sturdy”. We built things that were “sturdy,” and our shoes were “sturdy.” Mid-Westerners were “sturdy”. It connoted resilience, strength, the ability to hear bad...
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6 Ways Agencies Can Reduce the Terror of Living as a Person with a Diagnosis...
There are a lot of people who think Martin Luther King’s greatest contribution to society was the “I Have a Dream” speech. I think it was something far more profound and important. Hamden Rice, in a...
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The Clinician’s Illusion: How Mental/Behavioral Health Agencies Suggest and...
As a clinician, are you seeing a true cross-section of people who could be diagnosed with mental illness, or only those who need and seek your help? It was 1995. I was seated at a banquet table to...
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Caseloads, Budgets, and Care: Pills Trump People When It Comes to Revenue
Here’s what a typical workday looks like for an employee at a mental health agency: Eight hours minus two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch. In most states, that leaves only seven hours for...
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Trauma, Bush, and Broadening the Definition of PTSD (Without the “D”)
Last week in the Dallas Morning News, staff writer Tom Benning wrote about Former President George W. Bush:“Bush, speaking at a summit he convened on veterans’ issues, said that the condition has been...
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4 Tips to Avoid Excluding and Isolating People Affected by a Mental Health...
A reader asked me last week why I focus so much on being sure to include everyone in the population of people diagnosed with mental illness, able to be diagnosed, or with a family member diagnosed....
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Double Standard in Medication Compliance for Those Diagnosed with Mental Illness
I have a friend who has diabetes. When she doesn’t check her blood sugar or take her medication, people don’t say it’s because of her diabetes. Another friend has hypertension. When he doesn’t take...
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Bullying in Mental Health Care: Misuse of Authority and Power Can Trump Wellness
You can’t open a newspaper or turn on the radio without hearing about bullying in kids. It’s a form of violence that degrades the self, disconnects children from social networks, and often paralyzes...
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Trauma or Brain Chemistry? What Science and Rick Warren Say About the Cause...
Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church Last week, Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA, and whose son committed suicide, joined with the...
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One Heartbreaking Way Treatment Centers Incentivize Illness
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of teaching at an organization that is named a “treatment program” for addicted women who live there with their children. I met with the staff in the chapel where...
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Risking Connection After Trauma
Risking connection is the most challenging task for people who have experienced trauma—that is, any event so overwhelming that it causes the inability to cope resets expectations for the world and can...
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