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The New York Chapter of the Association of Behavioral Healthcare Management held a one day conference in Poughkeepsie on September 20th.

What is the difference between behavioral healthcare and mental healthcare? Behavioral healthcare is more expansive. It includes substance abuse and chemical dependency. "I don't like the term behavioral healthcare because it assumes that behavior is something that can be controlled," said Joe Glazer, President/CEO of the Mental Health Association of New York State. I think what Mr. Glazer meant was that healthcare of any kind tries to control a physical or mental problem, whereas behavioral healthcare targets a behavioral problem. According to Mr. Glazer during his presentation, New York had 33 state-run psychiatric hospitals housing nearly 90,000 patients decades ago. Today, there are 28 such hospitals housing only around 5,000 patients. Where are the missing patients? He said most of them are falling through the cracks in the mental health system. We know that nearly 15,000 psychiatric survivors today are living in adult homes, many of which are much worse than the state hospitals they come from. According to Mr. Glazer, 870,000 Americans with psych disabilities are in prison, jail, on probation or parole. He described the current phenomenon of transinstitutionalization where consumers transfer from one institution to another in a never-ending cycle; from jail to hospital to street, and back to jail again. He suggested that community-based care, which all discharged patients were intended to receive, is no more than outpatient care. He sees a need for community inpatient care with proper discharge planning to community programs in order to preserve the continuum of mental health care.

Besides Mr. Glazer, other speakers included: Ronald J. North, Harry Shallcross, Eve Green Koopersmith, Bill Powanda and John Coppola. They spoke on a range of subjects interesting to behavioral healthcare providers. Of note was the wealth of behavioral healthcare materials on display, including New York City Voices and some other material geared for consumers such as pamphlets on how the ADA protects us against employment discrimination and the rights of outpatients. Mark Gustin, President, Association of Behavioral Healthcare Management's New York chapter moderated and put the conference together.