American Psychological Association. (2020, August 26). Resilience guide for parents and teachers. http://www.apa.org/topics/resilience-guide-parents

To everyone resisting the urge to start therapy now: Now is the time. The APA, WHO, and all other mental health organizations, professionals, and experts are now weighing in on the extreme stress the current situation is causing. Please don’t hesitate to call or email us to make an appointment. We can do in-person, video, and phone therapy. Don’t hesitate. We’ll get you in within 3 working days!

To all of our existing clients: We’re aware of how stressful this is and we want to thank you for continuing to trust us in this most stressful hour. We will continue to be business as usual and be here to meet your needs.

www.alanbehrman.com 770-361-7864 [email protected]

For all new and existing clients:

We are open for business as usual. If you’d like to come in the office for your visit, we have hand sanitizer, practice social distancing, and have plenty of space in our lobby (and toilet paper). However, if you’d like a teletherapy appointment, all of our therapists are available for that as well.

Don’t let COVID-19 stop you from getting the help you want!

GREAT BIG NEWS!!!! As many of you know, we’ve been working diligently to help our clients find someone who can manage their medications. After a long, exhaustive search, we’ve finally got that in place!

Welcome to our team Pat Jones, APRN

Pat will be working out of our Alpharetta/Roswell office beginning in February 2020 and will be closely affiliated with Alan Behrman & Associates, PC.

What does that mean? While Pat has been in her own practice for over 35 years, she’s graciously accepted an affiliation with us. While it may take the average person months and months to find and get a first appointment with with a psychiatrist, PA, or NP, our clients will now have quick access to scheduling.

Not only will our clients get priority access to scheduling for medication management, because Pat will be working out of our office, your prescriber and therapist can easily communicate with each other to meet your needs quickly!

Remember, this a special benefit for clients who are actively in counseling/therapy with any of therapists at Alan Behrman & Associates, PC regardless of which location they use.

www.alanbehrman.com 770-361-7864 [email protected]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — People seeking treatment for mental illness and substance use disorders continue to pay more and face more barriers to accessing care than those seeking care for physical illness, according to a report released today from Milliman, Inc., and the disparity has worsened over the past two years.

Patients using commercial PPO health plans – considered “Cadillac plans” because of their “generous” coverage — are significantly more likely to have to pay out of pocket for mental health care compared to general medical care, according to the report, commissioned by The Bowman Family Foundation. When patients cannot find a physician in the plan’s network, they must go out of network and incur financial responsibility for a large portion of the bill. In 2017, 17% of behavioral office visits were to an out-of-network provider, compared to 3% for primary care providers and 4% for medical/surgical specialists. This disparity is a major financial obstacle to many with mental illness or substance use disorders.

These results are consistent with “secret shopper” studies the American Psychiatric Association has done indicating that provider directories provided by plans for mental health care are inaccurate and it is often not possible to obtain a mental health appointment in a reasonable amount of time because the plan discourages participation by mental health providers through discriminatory reimbursement rates.

In 2017, primary care reimbursements were about 24% higher than behavioral reimbursements. In 11 states primary care reimbursements were 50% higher than behavioral health reimbursements. To make that clear, if a patient sees their primary care provider for treatment of depression, the plan will pay that doctor up to 50% more than it would pay a psychiatrist – a medical doctor with four to five years of additional residency training in mental health care to treat that same patient for depression. This disparity is designed to discourage mental health professionals from participating in plan networks and to ensure that plan participants do not access care.

“The results of this study should set off alarm bells for all of us who care about our nation’s health,” said APA President Bruce Schwartz, M.D. “Discriminating against people with mental illness by restricting their access to care means that more people will suffer and some will die as a result of lack of access to life-saving treatments,” he said. “Given we are in the midst of an opioid epidemic and a public health crisis of rising suicide rates, insurers, states, law enforcement, plantiffs’ attorneys, and the federal government must do better to ensure people who need it can access care.”

“Many states are trying to enforce the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which would preclude these results and APA appreciates their efforts,” said APA CEO and Medical Director Saul Levin, M.D., M.P.A. “But the problem is urgent and needs everyone’s attention. If a plan charges a patient for a product – access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment – and then ensures through its business model that there will be no providers to deliver that treatment – it is an unfair and deceptive trade practice.”

Are you one of the hundreds of thousands of employees or business owners who travel all the time for work? Do you never know when you’ll be available for a free hour? Does all this keep you from engaging in the therapy or counseling or life coaching that you want so you can deal with your anxiety, depression, marriage and family struggles, addictions, or whatever else you have going on in your life? We have the answer.

We have 3 concierge style of appointments you can make.

Option 1: For $120/session, you can book a phone session within 24 hours (Monday-Friday). This gives you the option to be on the road, in the airport, in your hotel, or wherever and arrange a therapy session very quickly as soon as you know your schedule for the next 24 hours.

Option 2: For $150/session, you can pre-book your travel phone sessions like a normal in office counseling session. However, if something comes up and you need to cancel within the 24 hour period that would normally fall under the late cancellation fee policy, you would only be charged $75 for the no-show/late cancellation fee rather than the full session amount.

Option 3: Pre-paid, “all-you-can-eat” style. For $700/month, you can have up to 2 sessions per week and you’re guaranteed a phone session within 24 hours. You get 2 free late cancellations/no shows per month at no charge.

Here’s the benefit for our traveling clients: phone sessions/consultations predominantly at your convenience, minimal no-show/cancellation fees, therapy with a highly qualified, known therapist who will work at your convenience and that you can develop a relationship with overtime since you’ll work together on a regular basis.

Call us at 770-361-7864 or email us at [email protected] to set your traveling therapy appointment up now.

By Abby Ohlheiser of the Washington Post

March 1

If you’re a parent of a young child, chances are that someone on Facebook has sent you an alarming post about the “Momo challenge,” a game illustrated by a disturbing photograph of a woman, in which participants are blackmailed into completing increasingly dangerous tasks. Maybe that post says that Momo is the latest “trend.”

Momo was perfectly tuned to set off alarms in the mind of any parent: There’s something online that you don’t know about, and it’s about to kill or traumatize your child. Just one problem: There’s little evidence to confirm that the Momo challenge is real. Although multiple deaths are often attributed to the challenge in warnings about it, none has been confirmed.

The panic over Momo followed a familiar pattern established by other supposedly viral “challenges” — the condom challenge and Tide pod challenge, for example — that caused a lot of hand-wringing but few, if any, documented injuries. The viral spread of this kind of story may say less about the danger these challenges pose to young people and more about the fear that the Internet inspires in parents.

[The ‘Momo Challenge’: A sinister threat to young people or an urban myth?]

On Feb. 17, a parent anonymously sent in a warning about the Momo challenge to a Facebook group for the town of Westhoughton, England. “I’m deeply alarmed I have discovered when I collected [my kid] today … the teacher asked to talk to me. She said [my kid] had made three kids cry by telling them that ‘Momo was going to go into their room at night and kill them.’” The post contained a description of the challenge and urged other parents in town to talk to their kids about bad people online.

That post soon became an article in a local paper. It was then picked up by national tabloids like the Daily Mail and Daily Star. Many of those reports focus on a particularly dark detail from the legend of the challenge: that its ultimate goal is to persuade participants to kill themselves on camera. “Suicide game hits Britain,” read one of the Star’s headlines.

As word of the Momo challenge spread, the Mail followed up with stories advising parents on how to handle it.

As local police stations and parents began picking up on the viral warnings and issuing their own, more legitimate outlets like the BBCalso jumped into the fray. And then, the warnings spread to America. A Florida news station claimed Momo was “the latest trend on social media.” Kim Kardashian shared one of the posts going viral that warned about it.

Whatever their intention, the person who put up the anonymous Westhoughton Facebook post set off a chain of events that made warnings about the Momo challenge go viral — even if there’s little evidence to suggest that the disturbing prank is popular at all among the kids that concerned parents are now rushing to protect. As New York Magazine wrote in an examination of the latest panic, it’s “a little strange that we’re once again talking about Momo in 2019. Strange, but given the way the web works, not that surprising.”

Momo has spread online not as a viral threat to children, but as a panic-induced news topic about a perceived viral threat to children. And like many viral challenges, Momo has spread on kernels of truth about the real dangers of the Internet for young children, appended to a repeated pattern of bad reporting on dangerous viral trends targeting children — which often turn out to be not trending at all.

Last year, a viral panic about the condom challenge spread through Parent Internet, warning about a “trend” encouraging kids to snort a condom up their nose and pull it out of their mouths to get views on social media. The Post traced the origins of that story, which generated headlines across the country, to a presentation attended by a small group of San Antonio parents in March 2018.

The presentation mentioned the condom challenge as an example of a dangerous viral teen challenge. Educators in San Antonio gave the same presentations for years. But on this date, a local news crew was present. Their report on the presentation was then aggregated by news outlets across the country, who focused in on the condom challenge and deemed it “every parent’s worst nightmare,” “the latest dangerous social media trend” and “trending” among teens.

[The condom challenge wasn’t the latest teen craze. Here’s how it went viral anyway.]

It wasn’t trending. Instead, The condom challenge was briefly popular on YouTube in 2013, thanks to a couple viral videos of people attempting it. The Post found no evidence that anyone on YouTube had tried the challenge for years. Instead, search results were full of videos warning about it. The same pattern has been repeated with the Tide pod challenge, the deodorant challenge and, to some extent, the Bird Box challenge.

Momo is similar: It is true that an extremely creepy image of a woman with bulging eyes and black hair has become a modern monster of online culture, one that has been in and out of the news cycle as reports and warnings pop up about the challenge. But the details that bolster its legend as something parents should be worried about don’t hold up. As The Post reported in September, when the challenge previously made the news, three deaths are often attributed to the challenge, but none of those reports has a proven connection.

Another warning, posted first to Facebook and then reposted to Twitter (where it has tens of thousands of retweets) claims that videos showing Momo are rampant on YouTube and YouTube Kids: “It doesn’t come on instantly so it’s almost as if it waits for you to leave the room then comes on in mid show. It’s been seen on Peppa Pig, LOL DOLL, those surprise eggs, and a few others.” But when The Post attempted to find any of these videos, we came up short. Instead, several popular YouTube videos warned about the possibility of a Momo scare in videos targeting kids. In others promising to show “proof” the rumors were real, the proof was often less than convincing.

But this warning, too, feeds off real concerns about what children are exposed to on YouTube. The Post reported earlier this week on parentswho were finding disturbing, violent clips spliced into videos targeted to children on the platform. But there’s no evidence that Momo videos trying to trick children into self harm are viral on YouTube or YouTube Kids. If they exist at all, they’re extremely hard to find. In a statement, YouTube also denied that Momo was spreading across their platform.

[A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids]

“After much review, we’ve seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube,” the statement reads. “Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are clearly against our policies, the Momo challenge included. Despite press reports of this challenge surfacing, we haven’t had any recent links flagged or shared with us from YouTube that violate our Community Guidelines.”

YouTube also announced that it would demonetize (or prohibit ads on) all videos about the Momo Challenge, including those from news organizations and YouTube creators commenting on the spread of the panic, the Verge reported.

As the Guardian noted, one of the more disturbing things about Momo’s viral spread as a warning to parents is the seriousness of the underlying topic of suicide. Samaritans, a Britain-based suicide prevention organization, told the Guardian that they were concerned all the coverage of the Momo challenge was “raising the risk of harm” for vulnerable people. “These stories being highly publicised and starting a panic means vulnerable people get to know about it and that creates a risk.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, risk factors associated with suicide may include mental disorders such as clinical depression, previous suicide attempts, a barrier to accessing mental health treatment, physical illness and feelings of hopelessness or isolation. Those who need help, including children, can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.

Both Kelly Hindman and Lisa Ibekwe are now open for scheduling appointments in our new Alpharetta/Roswell office.