Thank you to everyone in the GOSO community, our Board and all our guests who made it to the Yale Club this morning for our second annual Our Voices Ourselves breakfast. In addition to honoring The Child Center of NY for their invaluable partnership with GOSO to provide robust mental health services, and our beloved art therapy practitioner Anelle Miller, GOSO moderated an insightful expert panel highlighting the need for advocacy and collaboration to provide essential mental health care for individuals in the criminal legal system and the crucial role women play. Mental Health Advocate and Speaker Dr. Julie Neches additionally shared her daughter’s personal experiences with the mental health and criminal legal systems.
We’re grateful to our panelists and speaker for sharing their visions for how to improve mental health care for incarcerated and court-involved people, a major focus of our programming. GOSO firmly believes we can make a difference in young people’s lives by having these dialogues and working together to address mental health-related issues for the most vulnerable among us.
At GOSO, we ensure that every participant has the support necessary to achieve their goals, and a crucial part of that is our strong emphasis on mental health care. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan, PhD spoke up for compassion, understanding, advocacy, and more robust care for individuals who are incarcerated after experiencing trauma and mental health issues: “My vision is to stop having prisons and Rikers Island be the new psychiatric facilities—we need healing centers instead.”
It’s also crucial to not squander progress made on individuals’ care when they are released or transferred to another facility. Dr. Lorie A.L. Nicholas, PhD, who has spent many years advocating for care for people in a federal prison, noted the dire need for more coordination between facilities when it comes to mental health care. At GOSO, we believe coordinated and effective care is essential, both in and outside of jails and prison. We were happy to hear Dr. Lorie’s additional advocacy for “having strong programs in place so that when they return to society, it’s a collaboration.”
As a pediatrician, our third panelist Dr. Nicole Brown has a firsthand understanding of how mental illness affects young people. She agreed about the critical need for collaboration: “We’ve got to get out of our silos, bring clients and patients and parents into these conversations, and come up with shared goals and plans for care.”
