Outpatient therapy, intensive outpatient programs (IOP), partial hospitalisation (PHP), inpatient care, and telehealth — what each level offers and how to choose.
Maya was 15 and had been quietly losing weight since the previous October. Her parents in suburban Atlanta first noticed in November, when her ninth-grade school photos came back and her mother saw the hollows in her cheeks she had been hiding under bulky sweaters at the dinner table. By February she had missed 23 … Read more
Damon was 27 years old and standing in front of a Brooklyn arraignment judge for the third time in 14 months when his Legal Aid attorney asked, almost in passing, whether he might qualify for the Brooklyn Mental Health Court calendar instead of the regular criminal docket. He had been picked up for criminal trespass … Read more
On a Wednesday afternoon in Phoenix, Marisol noticed her hands trembling as she sat in her parked car outside her office. She had run out of her sertraline four days earlier because her psychiatrist’s portal kept rejecting the refill request. Sleep had collapsed. Her boss had pulled her aside that morning to ask if everything … Read more
By the second visit to the emergency room in three weeks, Priya’s husband finally said it out loud at the kitchen table in Austin. He could not keep doing this. Priya had been in weekly therapy for six months, on two psychiatric medications for four months, and she still spent most evenings curled on the … Read more
Three weeks into recovery, Reggie was sitting in his sister’s kitchen in Cincinnati when the pharmacy called. His monthly Vivitrol injection was approved, but the local CVS could not stock it. The pharmacist explained that Vivitrol is a specialty medication that ships from a designated specialty pharmacy, refrigerated, with a 48-hour delivery window, and his … Read more
It was 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in Manhattan when Daniel’s wife called 911. He had been awake for three nights, convinced the upstairs neighbors had installed a listening device, and he had just emptied a kitchen drawer trying to find proof. The paramedics took him to Bellevue Hospital. Daniel’s wife, Iris, expected the kind … Read more
Patrice raised her son Devin in a third-floor walkup in the Bronx, watched him graduate from a public high school, and then watched schizophrenia take him apart over five years. By the time Devin was twenty-six, he had been hospitalized eleven times, always brought in by police, always discharged within ten days with a prescription … Read more
When the Henderson family of Boulder finally sat down with an educational consultant, they had already lived through eighteen months of escalating crisis. Their fifteen-year-old son Caleb had cycled through outpatient therapy, an intensive outpatient program, two short psychiatric hospitalizations, and a residential treatment stay that ended after his insurance ran out. The school district … Read more
Sophia Marquez was sixteen when she came home from her second residential treatment stay in Minneapolis. Her parents had pulled her from the comprehensive high school where she had been using opioids since freshman year. The treatment team’s discharge plan called for her to enroll somewhere with sober peers, integrated counseling, and accountability that did … Read more
Marcus Reyna did three combat tours in Helmand Province before the Marine Corps medically retired him in 2019. The PTSD diagnosis came first, the alcohol came second, and by the time he was thirty-two he had been evicted from two apartments in San Antonio and was sleeping in his pickup outside a Whataburger. A VA … Read more