Campaign for Child and Adolescent Mental Health: A focus on suicide prevention
May is Mental Health Awareness month, which provides a stark reminder of the crisis in availability of mental health services in the Central New York region. It is also an opportunity for hope as the Upstate Foundation reports on progress made through its campaign to support Child and Adolescent Mental Health. The campaign seeks to help increase clinical capacity and improve access to critical services where they are most needed.
One of several pillar areas where the campaign aims to increase resources is suicide prevention. The Psychiatry High Risk Program at Upstate treats youth and young adults ages 14 to 40. Founded by Dr. Robert Gregory, the program has received national acclaim for its success with suicide prevention. In 2023, the program was designated by the national Suicide Prevention Resource Center as “a best practice in suicide prevention.” To date, over 600 adolescents and young adults have been treated; of those, one completed suicide.
“The things that were hard are no longer hard,” says Aidan (not his real name,) who completed the High Risk program about a year ago.
Throughout Aidan’s life, he experienced what he calls “depressive tendencies,” times when he felt down and disappointed in the way life was going, without any apparent reason.
He had a degree from an Ivy League school, a dream job, and a happy marriage with a wife who was also successful. “I felt like no one else was having a similar experience. No one had a shared perspective on how the world goes. I felt isolated, and not for lack of trying,” he says.
From the outside, things looked normal. Aidan and his wife moved to Upstate New York, bought a nice house and the car he’d always wanted. They became parents.
“I still felt this loneliness, this inability to connect,” Aidan says. “And I felt like, you’ve achieved everything, so now what? You crushed it, you should be super happy. But I wasn’t. This was a huge disconnect. This threw off my perception of life in general.”
Then came the crisis. One day, Aidan just broke. He went to his gun safe and began to take out weapons. His wife, terrified, called the police. They came and took him to a psychiatric crisis program in Syracuse.
Aidan describes that experience as traumatic and life changing. Following discharge, he resolved to take control, get out of his comfort zone, and try individual therapy.
That is when he found the Psychiatry High Risk Program at Upstate. There, Aiden finally found professionals who could hear and understand him, guide him and give him tools. He appreciated that the one-year program wasn’t “therapy in perpetuity.”
Looking back, Aidan is grateful he finally sought professional help for his emotional turmoil of paranoia and anxiety. “It’s gone from being a defining characteristic of my experience to being another thing that I can manage easily,” he says.
Unfortunately, the availability of mental health services in this area has never equaled the demand, especially for children and adolescents. The Upstate Foundation’s Campaign for Child and Adolescent Mental Health is an opportunity to help address that need. Please consider a gift to the Campaign. Thank you.