The Northeast Addiction and Mental Health Centre for Holistic Recovery (NAM) is a CRA registered charity dedicated to providing integrated addiction and mental health treatment that is evidence-based and trauma-focused. Founded in 2018 by Dr. Harbir Singh Gill, a certified addiction medicine specialist, NAM was formed to increase access to affordable, medically supervised, holistic recovery with special attention to marginalized populations.
Alberta’s current system for addressing the needs of a person experiencing a mental health and/or addiction crisis focuses primarily on stabilizing them in hospital emergency departments. If we only support patients to crisis stabilization, it is simply a matter of time before they destabilize back to crisis. This is both costly and deadly. While we have seen a growth in community-based mental health services in Alberta, increased access to culturally competent daily programming is needed in order to provide adequate services to individuals experiencing crisis. As such, we aim to enhance the capacity of our Personalized Recovery Program (PRP) to better serve marginalized populations with culturally appropriate services.
Our communities need crisis-capable daily programming with an emphasis on efficacy, resiliency, and support components. To address this need, NAM has implemented the PRP for crisis intervention, which provides a flexible and nurturing environment for those struggling with addiction and mental health to seek daily support. The PRP is a patient-centered program available to patients in crisis that directly averts interactions with police, EMS, and decreases emergency department utilization. The PRP offers patients a nurturing, healing space to participate in learning basic emotional regulation skills that form the bedrock of trauma recovery. PRP allows patients to present unscheduled to NAM during business hours to be engaged directly by our counselling and peer support team in meaningful crisis stabilization work. Through PRP, NAM is able to quickly stabilize patients through medical and intensive case management while simultaneously teaching emotional regulation skills. Patients are invited to attend the PRP program where we build tailored individualized care plans that progress patients from crisis stabilization through sustained recovery. The exact treatment modalities are tailored to each patient and delivered based on a patient led schedule.
Donation dollars will support our PRP with an enhanced capacity to stabilize people in crisis and simultaneously give them the support, knowledge, tools, and medical management they need to sustain deep recovery from addiction and mental health. The impact of this funding means we can enhance the delivery of culturally appropriate trauma-competent programming to underserved and racialized Calgarians, thus decreasing inequitable health outcomes. This initiative aims to cultivate a Therapeutic Community (TC), which is innately self-stabilizing through strong social and cultural engagement. TCs emphasize the importance of responsibility, accountability, structure, participation, safe environment, and education.