Understanding that mental illness can impact recovery, innovative services and interdisciplinary treatment teams now work with clients in all of the agency’s programs to diagnose and better treat those who struggle with mental illness.

Our staff are aware that many of our clients have experienced trauma, and we take great care to integrate work around trauma into our treatment. We assess all clients for trauma, and we seek an integrated approach to recovery that takes substance abuse, mental illness, and trauma into equal consideration.

With a multi-year funding award from Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administrations (SAMHSA), Palladia created the Portal Project, a trauma enhancement service offering treatment to clients and trauma training to on-site staff. The Portal Project’s services put safety first to help women gain skills and understanding to effectively cope and remain in treatment. Palladia succeeded in developing a gender-specific approach to integrating trauma into alcohol and other drug treatment.

Trauma was also a central theme of our successful 2004 conference, “A Better Future for Our Children: Collaborative Approaches to Working with Substance-Affected Families.” The conference featured national experts on trauma and its impact on parenting, as well as culturally competent program design. Proceedings and other online resources are currently available here.

Palladia offers interventions specifically tailored to mentally ill and chemically addicted (MICA) clients at our Starhill facility, the Albert and Mildred Dreitzer Women and Children’s Treatment Center and, in collaboration with FEGS, the Willow Avenue Shelter.

We put our experience in the field of mental health and trauma into practice every day in the Clinical Consultation Program. Under contract with the NYC Administration for Children’s Services, Palladia experts in mental health are placed in ACS field offices in the Bronx, where they train and advise ACS caseworkers as part of an interdisciplinary team.