Levels of Care

The Decision Most Families Make Without Information When a clinician recommends that a patient step up beyond outpatient mental health care to a higher level of treatment, the conversation usually narrows quickly to two options: a partial hospitalisation program at a local clinical setting, or a residential treatment program at a facility where the patient lives during … Read more

Marisol Vega had tried seven antidepressants by the time she walked into a Phoenix psychiatric office on a 112-degree afternoon in July. SSRIs flattened her into a fog. SNRIs gave her tremors. Two trials of bupropion did nothing. The 41-year-old marketing director had been depressed since her second child was born in 2019, and the … Read more

Marisol Vega had tried seven antidepressants by the time she walked into a Phoenix psychiatric office on a 112-degree afternoon in July. SSRIs flattened her into a fog. SNRIs gave her tremors. Two trials of bupropion did nothing. The 41-year-old marketing director had been depressed since her second child was born in 2019, and the … Read more

The Question You Have Been Afraid to Ask You drink to calm your anxiety. Three beers and the racing thoughts slow down. A glass of wine and the tightness in your chest loosens. The alcohol works. That is the problem. It works so well that you have started to depend on it. Now you wake … Read more

The Question You Have Been Afraid to Ask You drink to calm your anxiety. Three beers and the racing thoughts slow down. A glass of wine and the tightness in your chest loosens. The alcohol works. That is the problem. It works so well that you have started to depend on it. Now you wake … Read more

Caleb sat on the edge of the bed in a treatment centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on the morning of his second day off oxycodone, sweating through a t-shirt he had already changed twice. He was thirty-four. He had been taking forty milligrams of oxycodone three times a day for the better part of seven years, … Read more

Caleb sat on the edge of the bed in a treatment centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on the morning of his second day off oxycodone, sweating through a t-shirt he had already changed twice. He was thirty-four. He had been taking forty milligrams of oxycodone three times a day for the better part of seven years, … Read more

Hannah Quigley washed her hands until they bled. The 27-year-old graphic designer from Saint Paul had developed contamination OCD after a hospital stay in 2022, and by spring 2025 she was spending 11 hours a day on rituals: showering 90 minutes, scrubbing doorknobs with bleach. Her outpatient ERP therapist tried for nine months. Her psychiatrist … Read more

Hannah Quigley washed her hands until they bled. The 27-year-old graphic designer from Saint Paul had developed contamination OCD after a hospital stay in 2022, and by spring 2025 she was spending 11 hours a day on rituals: showering 90 minutes, scrubbing doorknobs with bleach. Her outpatient ERP therapist tried for nine months. Her psychiatrist … Read more

By the time Tomas turned twenty, his parents in Toledo, Ohio, had not slept a full night in nearly three years. Their son, who had been diagnosed with profound autism and intellectual disability at age two, had become physically dangerous to himself and to them. He weighed two hundred and ten pounds. He could no … Read more