ARcare – behavior health
My name is Frank Vega. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’m the Director of Behavioral Health for ARcare. We offer traditional behavioral health and outpatient behavioral health services where individuals can call in or be referred by a provider like their doctor or someone in the community that has referred to us and scheduled appointments. They would meet with one of our licensed clinical social workers to address some of the needs that they have and some of the issues that they’re struggling within their lives.
My name is Toneisha Baker and I am a licensed clinical social worker. At ARcare, I am a therapist. I provide psychosocial therapy, as well as therapy for patients in our medication, assisted treatment program. We provide therapy for patients who have any kind of mental health diagnosis. I’m a true believer that if you can get patients to change the negative thought patterns that they have, then that will, in turn, change their feelings and their behavior. A lot of times, people don’t even realize that they’re having negative thoughts, so the first step is getting them to be able to identify those thoughts and then reframing those negative thoughts into more positive thoughts.
We also offer what we call Integrated Behavioral Health Care Services and really what Integrated Care does is it shows the link between behavioral health and physical health. It really looks at treating the person as a whole instead of in silos. It’s really effective in managing things like depression, diabetes, and assisting folks in learning the skills that they need in order to be successful in their lives.
My name is Laurie Geurin and I’m a therapist and social worker for ARcare. My typical day is very different every day. It kind of depends on who comes in and what needs they have as to what the day’s going to be like. It may be sitting in an office and seeing people for out-patient counseling. It may be getting called in by the physician or APRN, the nurse practitioner, to see someone that may be having a crisis or maybe they’re just having a little anxiety about coming to counseling. They want to refer them to counseling. ARcare is a great place to come for a number of services. We have medical services, nursing services, we have nurse practitioners, we have therapists. We also have a Ryan White program that’s for folks who are HIV positive, with or without symptoms. We have the substance abuse MAT program, medically assisted treatment, for people getting off opiates. We have counseling in different locations. We also have transportation if someone needs assistance getting to or from their appointments. Sometimes people don’t come because they can’t get there, so we have transportation services available.
The last program that we offer is our medication-assisted treatment program or the use of Suboxone for treating individuals that are addicted to opiates.
I’m Dr. Terry Jefferson and I’m the medical physician for the MAT program here at ARcare. The MAT program here at ARcare includes assessing patients and what we’re trying to do, the whole concept of MAT which is medication-assisted treatment is to save lives. It’s a several-pronged approach. You have medication, you have counseling, and then you have group therapy.
And really, it’s more about the approach that we take in working with individuals, but also, the potential for that integrated care. Your outcomes and the impact that you can have in the lives of individuals is far greater than just traditional behavioral health services.