Outreach & Advocacy For Co-Occurring Patients

-What Does Outreach and Advocacy For Co-Occurring Patients Mean? It
-What is co-occurring Outreach Program?
-Who is eligible for the Co-Occurring Outreach?
-What services does the Co-Occurring Outreach Program offer?
-Advocacy for Co-occurring Patients
-Empathic Counseling
-Advocacy And Public Awareness
-Networking
-Focus Groups
-Speakers Bureau
-The Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network
-Mental Health Literacy Campaigns

What Does Outreach and Advocacy For Co-Occurring Patients Mean?
Advocacy and proper outreach are some of the critical factors of Integrated treatment for co-occurring patients, which addresses access by ensuring that one visit, in one setting, is sufficient to receive treatment for both disorders. It addresses the challenge of combining messages and philosophies by clearly treating the treatment provider instead of the client.

What is the Outreach Program?
Co-occurring disorder outreach services include community supports to adults experiencing co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. The outreach is a rehabilitation oriented service that integrates substance abuse services with mental health services. The outreach program team works more intensely with individuals to build skills and develop resources needed to reduce harms associated with substance use and be successful in any of the following life areas: living, learning, working and participating in social networks.

-Who is eligible for the Co-Occurring Outreach?
People diagnosed with a mental health disorder and have a co-occurring substance use disorder are eligible for this program. Individuals must be willing to participate in intensive integrated substance use and mental health restoration services that could not be achieved in a less intensive program. The outreach team will complete an assessment to determine eligibility.

What services does the Co-Occurring Outreach Program offer?
The co-occurring program outreach team's role is to integrate mental health and substance use services. Some of the services provided include:
• Consultation and Assessment
• Linking to services/resources
• Case Management
• Individualized service planning
• Assertive Outreach
• Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) skills training in group and individual formats.
Advocacy For Co-Occurring Patients
Try to maintain a therapeutic alliance with clients who have co-occurring disorders is essential and challenging. It is of great importance for the counsellor's and patients' immediate community family to have the ability to manage feelings and biases that could arise when working or relating with clients with co-occurring through proper education and advocacy (sometimes called countertransference). Professionals, caregivers, and clients should monitor the client's disorders by examining each condition's status and alerting each other to relapse signs. The consensus panel recommends that counsellors use a supportive, empathic, and culturally appropriate approach when working with clients with co-occurring disorders. With some clients who have co-occurring conditions, it is vital to distinguish attitudes and beliefs that are cultural in origin from those indicative of a mental illness. Consultants and counsellors should increase structure and support to help their clients with co-occurring conditions make steady progress throughout recovery.
It is also necessary to point out techniques effective in counselling clients with co-occurring disorders. One is the use of motivational enhancement consistent with the client's particular healing stage. This strategy is helpful even for clients whose mental condition is intense. Other methods include contingency management, relapse prevention, and cognitive-behavioural techniques. For clients with functional deficits in understanding instructions, repetition and skill-building procedures can aid progress. Clinicians often play an essential role in facilitating these clients' participation in recovery groups.

Empathic Counseling
A supportive and empathic counselling style is one of the keys to establishing an effective therapeutic alliance. According to Ormont, empathy is the ability to “experience another person's feeling or attitude while still holding on to our attitude and outlook”; it is the foundation adults use for relating to and interacting with other adults. The clinician's empathy enables clients to start to recognize and own their emotions, an essential step toward managing them and learning to empathize with others' feelings.
However, this type of counselling must be used overtime consistently to keep the alliance intact. This caveat often is critical for clients with a co-occurring disorder, who usually have a lower motivation to address either their mental or substance abuse problems, have greater difficulty understanding and relating to other people, and need even more understanding and support to make a significant lifestyle change such as adopting abstinence. Support and empathy in the clinician's role can help maintain the therapeutic alliance, increase client motivation, assist with medication adherence, model behaviour that can help the client build more productive relationships, and support the client as he or she makes a major life transition.

Advocacy And Public Awareness
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It's through advocacy and public awareness that we reduce the stigma that is associated with co-occurring disorders. At the Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network, we advocate for better treatment standards for individuals with co-occurring disorders. We work with chemical dependency, mental health, consumer and family advocacy organizations to educate and publicize the need for more appropriate services for co-occurring conditions. Our mission is to enhance recovery opportunities for individuals and families in dual recovery.
• Participate with community-based mental health, chemical dependency, and consumer advocate organizations.
• Offer in-service and workshop presentations to increase public awareness and reduce the associated stigma. It's through advocacy and public awareness that we reduce the stigma that is associated with co-occurring disorders. At the Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network, we advocate for better treatment standards for individuals with co-occurring disorders. We work with chemical dependency, mental health, consumer and family advocacy organizations to educate and publicize the need for more appropriate services for co-occurring conditions. Our mission is to enhance recovery opportunities for individuals and families in dual recovery.
• Participate with community-based mental health, chemical dependency, and consumer advocate organizations.
• Offer in-service and workshop presentations to increase public awareness and reduce the stigma associated with dual disorders.
• A speakers bureau of individuals with expertise in dual disorders and recovery.
• Coordinate a statewide organization, the Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network (DDRN).
• Provide educational brochures and pamphlets about co-occurring disorders.
• Anti-Stigma Campaign
• Consumer Rights
• Mental Health Parity Legislation
• Register to Vote
• U.S. House of Representatives
• U.S. Senate

Networking
DDRN advocates are networking with regional community based mental health, chemical dependency, social service, churches, regional state planning groups, and advocacy organizations. The advocates bring the desires of individuals who experience dual disorders and family members to community organizations' attention.

Focus Groups
DDRN will conduct community-based focus groups. The groups offer individuals dual recovery, family members and services providers an avenue to identify problems associated with dual disorders and discover community-based solutions. The participants will then have the opportunity to form ongoing task force groups to continue to work together to enhance and develop recovery opportunities for individuals and families affected by dual disorders.
The groups will offer individuals in Dual Recovery, their family members and service providers a forum to identify problems associated with dual disorders and community-based solutions. The participants will then have the opportunity to create an ongoing task force to enhance and develop recovery opportunities.

Speakers Bureau
The DDRN maintains a statewide speaker bureau. The bureau offers community groups and agencies an opportunity to have regional and state-level speakers to address dual disorders and dual recovery issues. The speakers' bureau will comprise individuals in double recovery, family members and professionals.

The Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network
The Dual Diagnosis Recovery Network is a statewide organization with regional chapters that offer individuals in dual recovery, their families, and service providers a means of working together to enhance recovery opportunities within the community.
Regional chapters allow those involved in dual recovery to make contact with one another and assess their community's needs. Through education themselves, the general public and policymakers, individuals with a dual diagnosis can ease the stigma and raise care level. By providing a voice in the community, regional chapters can help develop improved services and support systems for those with a dual diagnosis. This can include active participation in local and state government, educational and providing local support groups. If you would like more information on groups in your area or start a regional chapter, please contact us with dual disorders.

Mental Health Literacy Campaigns
Mental health literacy programs are a common educational technique. Educators, health professionals, and policymakers have recognized the vital role of schools in addressing young people's mental health needs and endorsing school mental health programs. There is evidence that some in-school mental health literacy programs improve knowledge, attitudes, and help-seeking behaviour. More study is needed before decisions to scale-up mental health literacy campaigns to the national level. There is also some evidence that primary health schooling to improve mental health literacy may effectively reduce stigma for school-age children; however, to enhance public attitudes without negatively impacting self-stigma, the curricula need to be recovery-focused and developmentally and cognitively tailored to different age groups. One such program is mental health first-aid, in-person training that teaches participants to respond to developing mental health problems and crises.
Mental health literacy campaigns have also encouraged individuals and families to seek needed assistance. This is a fundamental goal because early diagnosis and treatment are predictive of exceptional recovery outcomes, but high-quality, culturally informed treatment is not widely available, especially to racial and ethnic minority groups. The behavioural model of health service use, which was first used to identify factors that influenced families' utilization of health care services, has been expanded to examine health-seeking behaviours for many different groups, including minorities and children and adolescents. Some used the original model to develop a help-seeking model for mental health service use among ethnic minority families. They identified four stages in the process of deciding to seek care for a child with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: problem recognition, the decision to seek help, service selection, and service utilization. The researchers noted that the problem-recognition stage is crucial as it is the first step in accessing care. Families are more likely to seek treatment for symptoms attributed to illness than for symptoms attributed to family relations or personality factors. Although campaigns that promote biogenic explanations of mental and substance use disorders are not generally effective in reducing perceptions of dangerousness and desire for social distance among the general public, there is information that biogenic cause attributions minimize blame. Biogenic explanations may help counter-culturally specific negative attitudes about mental disorders and promote parental help-seeking behaviors for children's cognitive health problems. Efforts to close the treatment gap in access to mental health care between whites and ethnic minorities might include campaigns that target ethnic minority parents, as well as trusted community figures with news about the biological underpinnings of mental ailments.