What is your background? How long have you been with Quartet, and how did you get here? 

I joined Quartet almost exactly a year ago! I transitioned here from Duke, where I worked with newly postpartum parents and as a care manager for Population Health. Prior to Duke, I spent more than a decade as a therapist in community mental health.

Describe your role at Quartet.

I’m the Clinical Care Navigator for Quartet’s New Jersey and Pennsylvania markets. I work on connecting clinically complex patients to providers, support patients with acute needs who require triage, consult on clinical issues with other Care Navigators, and evaluate high acuity new referrals to ensure these patients are safe to wait for connection to care.

What does a typical day look like for you? 

It varies a good bit! I usually jump in to help my market team with any backlog needs and make some calls to our East Coast patients first, then transition to reviewing clinically acute new referrals and expediting those patients as appropriate. I often field a Slack or two to review complex cases and next steps for other CNs. At any point, I may need to stop what I’m doing to take an incoming call from a distressed patient, one experiencing a medication shortage or mental health crisis, or a patient who needs expedited connection to a provider.

What kinds of patients do you most commonly support? What kinds of needs or problems are they facing with regards to care? 

As a Clinical Care Navigator, the patients I work with usually have significant mental health concerns (Bipolar Disorder, schizophrenia) or are using substances. These patients may face obstacles related to how their mental symptoms impact their functioning (lack of energy/motivation, anxiety, cognitive distortions, SI, hallucinations or delusions), so being able to streamline the process of getting them connected to a provider is really invaluable.

Can you share some memorable or particularly rewarding patient cases that have stood out to you? 

Most recently, there was an older woman who was homebound and had chronic pain, and she had never tried therapy before. I caught her on a difficult day and she expressed that while she wouldn’t harm herself, she didn’t want to be here anymore. She really wasn’t enjoying anything about her life and wasn’t sure therapy could be helpful. I validated her experience, tried to build rapport with her, and offered hope that if nothing else, therapy could at least decrease her isolation. It was enough to open her to giving it a try (or as she said: “why the heck not?”).

There was also a patient we’d connected to care who became tearful when I called her to follow up on a recent appointment with her matched provider. She shared that she felt heard and seen by her provider, that he didn’t judge her or her situation, and that Quartet had been incredibly helpful in connecting her to him “at a time when I could barely function”. It was a reminder of why we do what we do. Folks experiencing mental health symptoms or healing from trauma often don’t have the mental and emotional energy needed for finding treatment. We get to help lessen the load.

How have patients responded to the part you’ve played in their care journey?

I’m from the South. When I started at Quartet, a lot of folks warned me that “people from New Jersey aren’t like people from North Carolina”. I envisioned a stereotype: blunt, abrasive, too busy to talk to me – which is actually the opposite of the people I’ve encountered in my market. I’m always taken aback by the kindness and gratitude I so often hear expressed by our patients, even in the midst of whatever difficulty is leading them to mental health treatment.

What do you love about your job?

I came to Quartet because improving access to care is something  I’ve wanted to work on for years, ever since I was in community mental health and saw the barriers folks encountered trying to get to care. I love getting to do the work of connecting our patients to mental health treatment. I love partnering with them to navigate barriers, and breaking down stigma by talking candidly with them about their mental health. And I love working with a team of smart, dedicated people who share that same passion for improving access.

The post A Day in the Life of a Quartet Care Navigator appeared first on Quartet Health.

How long have you been with innovaTel, and what drew you to joining the team? 

I’ve been with innovaTel a few months before they became innovaTel, since 2014. I was drawn to innovaTel because [our founders], Jon and Lee had vast experience in the mental health fields and had been running a very successful mental health clinic. They had an inspirational mission in wanting to improve access to care, specifically access to quality care.

In my time with innovaTel, I’m continuously impressed by its emphasis on this founding principle, but I am equally impressed, as an employee, with the way they support us as providers.

Tell us a bit about your background and what led you to psychiatry. How long have you been in the field?  

I had no intentions of a career in psychiatry. I actually started Medical school with a plan to do orthopedic surgery, but I did my third year rotation in Psychiatry and loved it. It’s been that ever since.

Where are you working now as part of innovaTel? 

It depends on the day – I see patients at a clinic in Pennsylvania that supports the LGBTQ+ community, a CCBHC in rural Minnesota, an intensive outpatient program, and a medical directorship in a different area of Minnesota that is pursuing CCBHC certification.

What does a typical day for you look like? Describe the type of support you offer the organizations, clinicians, and patients with whom you work. 

As you can see from the variety of sites, my day varies depending on the day of the week. Most days, I’m seeing patients from 8 am to 4 pm, with some administrative time built in and occasional recurring meetings.

Regarding support for the organizations, I try to be accessible to all of the locations, usually via email. This usually means medication problems or questions, refill requests, crises, etc. I make sure they know I am available throughout the day I am there but also accessible on days where I may not be working at their clinic.

Why is this type of support so valuable to organizations?  

Accessibility and responsiveness is really appreciated with telemedicine, seeing as staff can’t knock on your office door between patients to ask a question or talk about a problem.

Along those same lines, for patients who know I’m not physically in the clinic they attend, I want them to feel reassured that I will still manage their needs and attend to any crisis. Even on days where I’m working elsewhere!

What are some memorable success stories of patients you’ve treated? 

Polypharmacy is a common issue in our patient population, and it’s one of those problems I love to hate. I find the most success when I work with patients to gradually chip away at long medication lists, and they often feel much better. That is a more general area where I experience success.

To get more specific, one of the most unforgettable success stories I’ve had was when I was first starting to write buprenorphine for medication-assisted treatment of opioid use disorder. One of my patients told me their 4 kids experienced their first Christmas ever because this patient was no longer spending thousands of dollars on heroin each month.

What do you appreciate most about working as part of innovaTel? What keeps you here? 

I feel like innovaTel advocates for my needs in so many aspects of my career and life. If there are issues with a clinic, they are, from top to bottom, eager to assist in any resolutions. As an employer, they think about problems before they begin – such as making sure we manage isolation and avoid burnout. They also really understand and support family needs, enabling us to improve work/life balance.

What excites you about Quartet and innovaTel coming together to deliver speed to quality care?

I hope that coming together will result in exponential growth in access to quality care across the country. I’m also looking forward to seeing how technology changes in the coming years and believe this union will be a forerunner in the future of mental health treatment.

The post InnovaTel Provider Spotlight: Dr. Tanya Wozniak appeared first on Quartet Health.

The post Feeding and Eating Disorders: When Food is More Than Just Food appeared first on Quartet Health.

The post Substance Use Disorder appeared first on Quartet Health.

The post Post Traumatic Stress Disorder appeared first on Quartet Health.

Looking away from my therapist, I let the question sink in. The knot in my chest, not a new sensation of late, tightens slightly. 

Therapy is the latest new experience in a year already full of the unexpected. The conversation has turned to recent spirals of fear and rumination I was having trouble getting past, a cloud of interference over my day-to-day. 

Throughout my life, I’ve been lucky enough that my health hasn’t been a cause for much concern. “So healthy, it’s boring,” I say whenever it arises in conversation. Routine tests always come back normal, the flu has long been a foreign concept, and I’d always worn hardship well. 

When the pandemic began to wear on me by late spring, I told myself to suck it up. After all, I wasn’t the only one it was affecting. So, I persisted: through the waves of isolation, loneliness, and homesickness. You’ve come this far, keep going, I repeated to myself. 

I’d moved from Sydney, Australia to New York City just three months before the pandemic took over. The pendulum of my life had swung in two extreme directions in a very short amount of time. In fact, it was still swinging – nothing was fully familiar, or completely foreign. Everything in between only served as compounding factors that were felt all the more acutely.  

Gradually, my appetite started to wane. I noticed I was losing weight, as well as the increasing knots in my chest. Staying asleep for longer than six hours a night was impossible – abnormal for someone who needed eight hours at minimum to function. I struggled with concentration, and started having such horrible skin breakouts that I had to google “stress acne” to see if it really was a thing (turns out, it is). 

By the time summer arrived, I felt detached and less like myself. Homesickness had grown to the point where I physically felt the distance separating me and my family. Traveling to Australia was wrought with such strict measures that made going home arduous – financially and logistically. Crying spells would hit me in random moments, and on some days, it’d take every ounce of me to simply keep it together while strolling down the street. Even though I had friends around me, I missed the community of those I’d known for years. A rollercoaster of events in my personal life left me with emotional whiplash. 

Therapy had been in the back of my mind for a while, but I didn’t think I’d ever really “needed” it. But when I found myself in my bathroom one night, trying to catch my breath and stop myself from throwing up, I knew I needed help. 

A few minutes of silence pass before I look back at my therapist and respond. I realize that in every past hurdle or disappointment, I’ve always had something tangible to grasp and move forward with. The ability to see an action plan, understand why, or make improvements, has afforded comfort, certainty, and closure. There’s always been an antidote. Now, not only couldn’t I find one, but the mental and emotional weight of everything had crashed and landed on me all at once. 

As a chronic overthinker, sometimes, I’m so in it, it’s hard to take a step back and be honest with myself. Therapy has not only helped me to pinpoint behavioral patterns and connect them with the root of my emotions, but it’s also taught me proper mindfulness techniques to prevent these from festering. Every week, I have an uninterrupted hour to recalibrate my mind, and with the guidance of a professional, tackle what has become a complicated web of experiences and thoughts.

The knots in my chest are still there. Some days, they’re tighter than others. But now, instead of invalidation, minimization, or denial, I’m learning to sit with the full spectrum of what I feel. 

2020 hasn’t spared anyone of some degree of difficulty, grief, or loss. In efforts to be resilient or self-sufficient, it’s easy to tell ourselves to press on a little more, especially since we can’t always tangibly see the state of our minds (at least not immediately). But the same way we tend to our bodies – a cut here, sprain there – our minds deserve the same care. And therapy can help you come out even stronger than you thought you were. 

The post I Didn’t Think I Needed Mental Health Care, Until My Body Told Me Otherwise appeared first on Quartet Health.

Getting people the mental health care they need calls for a range of mental health care options. Below, you can learn more about the care options* available through Quartet.

Therapy

A therapist helps you to talk through your thoughts and feelings. This may be related to handling difficult experiences, solving problems, changing behavior or learning how to manage stress.

Therapy sessions are usually offered weekly for 45-60 minutes, and can either be in-person or virtual. Virtual sessions can be over the phone or video conferencing. How long you choose to attend therapy will vary depending on your individual needs and goals.

Psychiatry

A psychiatrist is a doctor who is trained and specializes in treating mental health conditions using medication. Psychiatrists will talk through your symptoms, create a treatment plan, explain medication options, and keep track of your progress.

Psychiatry appointments may be in-person or virtual, depending on the patient. Virtual sessions can be over the phone or video conferencing. First appointments may be between 45-60 minutes and follow up appointments are shorter and less frequent. Many people who see a psychiatrist also see a therapist.

Digital Options

Online programs allow you to access care wherever you are, at your convenience and help you manage symptoms like stress, anxiety, or sadness using tools that help you change behaviors and improve your outlook. These programs are goal-oriented and can be done on your own or with the support of an optional coach. Online programs are often accessible by phone, computer or tablet.

*The mental health care options available to you will depend on your clinical needs, preferences, and insurance. Policies regarding in-person or virtual care are subject to change, and it is recommended that you verify coverage with your insurance plan.

The post What Kind of Mental Health Care Options Can I Access Through Quartet? appeared first on Quartet Health.

At the same workplace, any time she showed any ounce of assertiveness or passion towards a project, a male superior would consistently tell her to stop “being sassy.”

“Another comment I get a lot is ‘Oh, you sound so articulate!’” Nicole* says. “Or I’ll speak to someone on the phone, and when I see them in person, they’re like, ‘I talked to you on the phone? It didn’t sound like you!’ What exactly am I supposed to sound like?”

These experiences represent some of the microaggressions that sadly, aren’t unusual among Black Americans. According to the American Psychological Association, microaggressions refer to the remarks, put-downs and insults that are directed to people of minority or marginalized backgrounds. These stem from unconscious biases and dominant societal values.

As the name suggests, microaggressions are easy to dismiss, particularly because they’re also often delivered casually. You may feel like you’ve been insulted, but can’t quite pinpoint the reason why. And it doesn’t help that the person who made the microaggressive comment isn’t aware of their offense. However, when sustained over time, as in the case of many marginalized groups, they can cause lasting damage.

“Microaggressions tear and attack at core esteem concepts, values and beliefs,” clinical social worker Jessica Baker says. “They impact people not only on an emotional level, but their self-esteem,  sense of safety and self-regard and ability to trust. They make you feel like you always have to have your guard up.”

Many people don’t realize that they may be carrying stress in their body from constantly feeling defensive. Baker says that this can wear on you both physically and mentally, because you feel like your body and mind are constantly going into defense mode.

“We’re already constantly distracted and busy [day to day], and once you factor in these stressors, it all adds up,” Baker says.

“It affected my self-esteem. I questioned my self-worth and whether I was supposed to be in the position I was in.”

In this way, microaggressions are likened to “death by a thousand cuts.” According to research, this kind of discrimination not only prematurely ages the body, but can trigger trauma, depressive symptoms and more.

In Lisa’s case, she says it was the little things that cumulatively began to affect her over time. “It affected my self-esteem. I questioned my self-worth and whether I was supposed to be in the position I was in.”

It also affected her mental health, causing anxiety and depression. “[I had] to get on medication and was having panic attacks driving to work,” she says. “That wasn’t safe for me or for the people on the highway, because hyperventilation isn’t fun when you’re trying to concentrate on driving. It got bad.”

“It inhibits your growth,” Nicole says. “It makes you feel low because it’s messing with your psyche.”

According to Baker, many people, especially in the Black community, hold onto resilience and dismiss these slights as just another thing to put up with. This was also true for Lisa, at least initially.

“Growing up in the south, I’d often tell my great grandmother and grandmother about the experiences that I had,” Lisa says. “They would tell me, ‘Well you just brush it off, you know how those people are.’ That’s what you had to do. And I was doing it until I just got tired of it.”

Sweeping these experiences under the rug is precisely what is so damaging. Baker advises that paying attention to how your body reacts to these comments is a good first step in recognizing how these comments are really affecting you. For example, is your breath becoming shallow? Are your hands tensing?

“You have to find a way to pour back into yourself. Something that at the end of the day will show you that you’re your own person and not defined by that person’s statement.”

Baker recommends using a technique called grounding to pull yourself out of that state of defense and bring you back to the present.  “If you can stay in your present and check in with the here and now, you’re not going to the future or past where you’ve been experiencing those constant stressor states,” she says. Thinking about the future will put you on alert, with thoughts like,  I can’t believe they did that, who else is going to do it next? Am I safe in my surroundings? Thinking about the past resurfaces memories of those who’ve made similar comments.

However you choose to respond to a microaggression – whether addressing it in the moment or moving on – one of the most important things you can do for yourself is not become numb to it. “You have to find a way to pour back into yourself,” Baker says. “Something that at the end of the day will show you that you’re your own person and not defined by that person’s statement.” And if this takes some time, that’s okay.

“[These comments] are muddled with our own internalized feelings,” Baker says. “If you’re feeling any push back, or if there are things coming up that might be negative or distressing, it might be time to take those thoughts and discuss them safely with a professional.”

Talking to a therapist can help identify and change those negative thoughts. “A lot of people don’t think they deserve better, especially in the Black community,” Lisa says. “People don’t feel like they’re worthy of change, because they’ve been told, either directly or through microaggressions, that they’re not. But getting any kind of help is going to give you the strength and courage to stand up for yourself and address it when it needs to be.”

*Names have been changed for privacy. 

The post What Microaggressions Are Really Doing to Your Health appeared first on Quartet Health.