Tagged with: Mental Health

Teleboxes for Telehealth

Paula Condol, seated, and Heidi Tupa, onscreen, demonstrate North Dakota's telemental health program.

Above: Dakota CAC Executive Director Paula Condol, MS, LPCC, (seated) and Red River CAC’s Heidi Tupa, MSW, LICSW, (onscreen) demonstrate how the telehealth system works.   Long before the pandemic… Continue Reading

What’s Next for Telemental Health?

For Michelle Miller, NCA’s mental health project coordinator, her proudest moment from 2020 was seeing our field come together in a crisis, everyone mobilizing at once to keep services available… Continue Reading

Family Engagement Starts with Screening and Assessment

Family time: a woman and girl are smiling as they use a tablet computer together. Photo by Michael Morse from Pexels.

For Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs), family engagement refers to the process of family members accepting a referral for mental health treatment, then attending and participating in that treatment to successful… Continue Reading

Engaging Families in Treatment: Whose Responsibility Is It?

A family of four, with a little boy and little girl, walk hand in hand.

The original mission of Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) was to improve a community’s response to the investigation of child abuse. The advances in our knowledge of trauma and the availability… Continue Reading

Trauma Treatment via Tele-health: Reaching Underserved Children in South Carolina

A young girl holding a computer demonstrates how a child could use a computer to interact with a doctor.

The use of tele-health services—providing therapy over a computer—is changing the landscape of mental health and providing more opportunities to disseminate evidence-based treatments to underserved communities. CAC professionals in South… Continue Reading

What About Post-Traumatic Growth?

My story didn’t begin with me having a voice. It began in the silence and secrets and shame that so many victims struggle to break free from. And for a… Continue Reading

Sustaining an Evidence-Based Practice

Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) have come a long way in the last 30 years.  We have added services and interventions based on solid research—evidence-based practices (EBPs)—all the while maintaining a… Continue Reading

What Others’ Trauma Leaves Behind

The American Counseling Association’s Traumatology Interest Network (2014) defines vicarious trauma as “the emotional residue from hearing other people’s trauma stories and becoming witness to the pain, fear, and terror… Continue Reading

The Lifelong Sting of Abuse

NOTE: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence against children. I was 23 years old, in my first job as an assistant social worker in the Atlanta schools, when I… Continue Reading

Treatment Starts with Assessment. Assessment Starts with Engagement.

NCA’s new Standards for Accredited Members call for an initial standardized mental health assessment and periodic re-assessment of children which serve to inform treatment. Every discussion about assessment (or screening) must be… Continue Reading