What is Core? In 2017, Westchester County Jail received an award from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care for implementing a progressive mental health program known as CORE, or the Community Oriented Re-Entry Program. The jail partnered with the Department of Community Mental Health who contributed staff and also invited several community providers to…
In this blog post, we welcome a member of our Board of Directors who has chosen to share her thoughts and observations on the subject of mental health stigma. The Battle Against Stigma Starts with Us All I am proud to be a member of the Board of Directors for CHOICE of NY. I believe…
A Smile & A Good Deed Go A Long Way In our latest post, we offer up a guest blog from Elizabeth Pedley, aka Sylvia Forrest, author of A View From My Window, a book of wonderfully enlightening short stories. She recently had an interaction with an Uber driver who reminded her just how impactful…
Cyber-bullying… technological overload… high-tech isolation… violent and realistic video games. And these are only some of the challenges facing our youth today. Add to that, the fact that globally, depression is one of the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents, and you can see why the theme for this year’s World Mental Health…
In our latest post, we offer up a guest blog from Elizabeth Pedley, aka Sylvia Forrest, author of A View From My Window, a book of wonderfully enlightening short stories. Elizabeth will occasionally be blogging for us in the future so stay tuned for more of her inspirational stories. She recently had an exchange with…
In our opinion, the first step in helping someone… anyone, actually… is to recognize their value as a human being. At CHOICE, we operate under the premise that everyone who walks through our doors deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. And in that vein, we don’t pigeon-hole ourselves with regard to what types…
Two celebrity suicides made news recently. It’s a tragedy. Even more of a tragedy is that the rate of suicide is growing in this country. And whenever a well known celebrity suffers from this fate, the news media brings the issue into our collective consciousness for a brief moment and gives us the opportunity to…
We are proud to unveil the new calendar feature on our website. We were having enough trouble ourselves keeping track of all of our group and world of work class schedules that we figured our clients must be having issues as well. So… we build a new interactive calendar that lays out all of the groups we…
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Given what we do at CHOICE, I’m not sure how much more aware we could be… in fact, we are painfully aware of the sheer numbers of Americans who are out there struggling day in and day out with mental health issues. And these issues vary in scale from…
Brian’s story warms our collective hearts. It’s just an amazing thing when CHOICE just…well…works! One of the things that distinguishes us from other agencies is our ability to go out into the field and address peoples’ needs where they live and where they hang out. If we hadn’t gone out to find Brian, he would…