Articles

View a presentation on the history and need for family/youth partners certification

The purpose of the Family and Youth Engagement Best Practices Report and this overview is to make recommendations based on what has worked for family, youth, including transition aged youth that will support best practices for the full inclusion of the family and, youth sector within public child family systems.

You can take positive steps to combat stigma. Progress is being made to remove the stigma of mental illness and mental health disorders. Stigma is a very real problem for people who have a mental illness. Based on stereotypes, stigma is a negative judgment based on a personal trait — in this case, having a mental health condition. By Mayo Clinic staff

The independent family organization we have today does not look like the organization we had envisioned in 1998. Our community graduated from SAMHSA CSOC in 2004, HFP, the family organization, became a program of a large mental health provider. A lesson learned from this experience might be that CSOC family organizations, at the beginning of strategic development should look for other funding which allows them to diversify their funding. However another perspective might be losing the independence of a family organization might have been necessary to our development; in that today we do have a strong independent family and youth led organization built on the foundation created by our Children’s System of Care.

Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless and vulnerable in a dangerous world. Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and alone can be traumatic, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.