mental health AIDS

Winter 2005 Newsletter / Volume 6, Issue 2

Center for Comprehensive Care

The Center for Comprehensive Care (CCC) at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center was established in 1986 and designated a New York State AIDS Center in 1987. As such, the CCC offers a continuum of services to persons living with HIV and AIDS. Today the CCC is one of the largest providers of HIV/AIDS health care and support services in New York State, serving more than 3,000 persons annually.

Having removed access barriers through the delivery of comprehensive services, CMHS/SAMHSA funding is being used to enhance programmatic structure through the development of services that did not exist or existed on a smaller scale prior to funding. The overarching goal for this project is to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in mental health referral and retention.

Clinical services include primary care mental health screening and referral, social work evaluation, mental health assessment, individual and/or couples/family counseling, group therapy, psychopharmacology, case management and referral, and three new programs:

• Patient engagement groups, designed to increase knowledge about "the range of problems for which someone might seek mental health care, the difference between psychiatry and psychology, what to expect at an initial mental health evaluation, symptoms of common mental disorders, and psychological side effects of HIV medications";
• The Parenting Journey, an intensive 12-week workshop in which parents come to understand the influences of their own personal histories on their roles as parents, developed by the Family Center in Somerville, Massachusetts; and
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training, modeled on the clinically proven program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

The Principal Investigator/Clinical Director is Hannah Wolfe, PhD; the Co-Principal Investigator is Victoria Sharp, MD; the Project Director is Christine Nollen, MPH, MPA. For more information, please call 212/523-6500 or go to: http://www.centerforcare.org/index.html.

– Compiled by the MHHSC Program Coordinating Center

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