McClendon Center

All clients meet with one of McClendon Center’s psychiatrists during their first post-Intake visit to determine if he/she could benefit from medication management. Most clients decide that medications would help them, though the option to take or not to take the medications remains entirely in the hands of the client. After the initial prescriprion(s), psychiatrists schedule a follow-up visit, usually within four weeks, so the doctor can determine how well the medication is working and whether or not there are any troubling side effects. The doctor works alongside the Center’s nurse, who also checks for physical conditions. The nurse often makes referrals to the consumer’s primary care provider and follows up to ensure that the consumer’s health is good. When needed, the Community Support Specialist assists the consumer in filling prescriptions.

When medications are properly managed, the client’s symptoms are controlled with the fewest number of medications and on the lowest possible dose. The client can assist greatly in this process by taking medications in the prescribed dose and at the designated time.

McClendon Center clients struggle with a range of issues that involve trauma, conflicts in relationships, and other troubling concerns. As part of their treatment, many clients explore these issued with a trained therapist. Upon request, a client can receive therapy, either from the Center’s therapist or upon referral to an agency with which the Center contracts. McClendon Center's therapist has a caseload of 55 individual clients, plus three groups: Women's Trauma group, Men's Empowerment Group, and a group for former professionals whose mental illness has forced them to miss out on life experiences they expected to have.

The Community Support program is an essential part of the services offered at our Core Services Agency (CSA). All clients who receive services at the CSA are assigned a Community Support Specialist (CSS) who goes out into the community to provide clients with home visits, rides to medical appointments, and help as needed with daily activities. Immediately after Intake, the CSS works with the client to develop a Treatment Plan, that guides the services the client receives.

However, veteran mental health practitioners have long known that people who have mental illness, a history of substance abuse, and a spotty employment record do not reliably adhere to their treatment plans. For these reasons, CSSs meet with clients at their homes, or whatever locations the client prefers (approximately 30% of McClendon Center clients are homeless upon intake). A Specialist’s job is to manage all aspects of their clients’ services from McClendon Center, and keep them engaged in their treatment, especially after their symptoms improve, which is when mental health clients have traditionally had high rates of drifting away from continued treatment.

Each Specialist is assigned to one of three teams, and each team consists of one Team Leader and eight Specialists, each of whom serves between 25 and 30 clients. These CSSs are necessary to provide effective mental health services. Clients routinely struggle to navigate the health care system, even at a basic level such as applying for benefits. Specialists provide a solution. They spend most of their time out of the office providing home visits, accompanying consumers to appointments, and helping consumers with numerous activities in the community. In fact, Community Support Specialists are issued cell phones as their office phones. This makes them easy to contact at all times, even after hours and on weekends when they forward their phones to a designated staff member who is on call for McClendon Center. Each consumer is encouraged to call when needed. This is particularly important when clients experience a crisis, which frequently occurs.

Being "out in the community” is fundamental to the Community Support program. By moving services away from an office and to a location of a client’s preference, the Community Support program keeps our clients engaged in their recovery, consistently, over an extended period of time. CSSs also build relationships with clients’ family and friends that facilitate other McClendon services such as counseling and medication management – services that absolutely require consistency in order to be effective.

McClendon Center's Day Program provides comprehensive mental health services all day, Monday through Friday, for approximately 80 adults with severe and persistent mental illness, including 10 who are Deaf or hard of hearing. The Day Program revolves around the Expressive Therapy Program, and McClendon Center offers the broadest array of Expressive Therapies in DC.. Whereas traditional psycho-educational approaches stimulate one part of the brain (primarily the areas that deal with language), the Expressive Therapy program allows clients to access psychological information by stimulating non-verbal brain functions. As Expressive Therapies progress, clients make connections between physical, visual, mental, and emotional realms. The result is that these therapies are uniquely effective at increasing social interaction, confidence, and improvement of general mental health.

In 2015, we partnered with AmeriHealth Caritas DC (AmeriHealth) and launched an innovative program, Patient Discharge Coordination (PDC). PDC transitions patients, covered by AmeriHealth, who are admitted to a psychiatric inpatient unit experience a seamless transition back into the community when they are discharged. PDC now serves high need members with medical issues, but who also have behavioral health concerns, and the success of PDC is evidenced by a reduction in the number of member readmissions and lower costs. In the last year, we have expanded our AmeriHealth collaboration to include Behavioral Health Engagement Services (BHES), which entails using a contract employee to find people in the community who had previously been lost to treatment; and Post Emergency Evaluation Services (PEES), which provides post-discharge assistance to members who have behavioral health concerns and have recently visited a hospital emergency department. We have also entered into a partnership with Beacon Health Options on behalf of Trusted Health Plan, providing PDC and PEES services for their clients with serious mental illness who have been hospitalized.