Bert Nash programs offer hope
When the Bert Nash Center was building its Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) programs in the 1990s, it received a lot of consultation and support from other program professionals who were ahead of the curve.
Now, it’s returning the favor.
“It feels very collaborative and collegial versus competitive and hierarchical,” said Juliet Nelson, who is the Bert Nash IOP/DBT team leader. “I think all of the practitioners who are sincerely involved with IOP/DBT have that same idea. We are in this together to help people recover from the most severe issues and create a life worth living.”
DBT is a comprehensive treatment program that combines the best of different cognitive-behavioral models.
Nelson, who has developed expertise in DBT over the last 20 years, was recently asked by the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School to share materials about the Bert Nash programs.
“It helps to reference ‘gold standards’ in the field such as yours,” the Rutgers contact told Nelson. Nelson is quick to give credit to those who blazed the trail in IOP and DBT.
“We certainly weren’t the first ones to do this,” Nelson said. “But there weren’t a lot of people doing it at the time, like there are now.”
For Nelson, though, the opportunity to go back and reflect on how Bert Nash developed and grew its IOP and DBT programs is a useful exercise.
“It was helpful to go back and think about how we built this and think, this is exactly what we need to do at the crisis center,” Nelson said about plans for a 24/7 crisis intervention center Douglas County officials and the Bert Nash administration have proposed. “That’s my vision for the crisis center. I think we would really benefit from having DBT services infused at every level in that facility. That’s my inspiration, to think about how to help both the staff and clients be as skillful as possible, so we are empowering people’s strengths and empowering people to know there is hope.”
A Bert Nash client who went through DBT said, “It’s not like I did DBT and then all problems went away. It was layers and layers of understanding things in different ways. I still feel everything I’ve been through, but at the same time, I have this freedom. It saved my life. DBT helped me become who I am.”
IOP and DBT are not cheap programs to develop and grow. Nelson is appreciative of the investment and support the programs have received from the Bert Nash administration.
“I think it’s a cool thing that these programs have been supported for so long at Bert Nash and that they’ve been allowed to grow and get stronger. There’s never been anybody who has said this hasn’t been worth our time and money, and that’s because of the really strong and steady leadership we’ve had,” Nelson said. “We’ve had two CEOs in the entire time that I’ve been here — and I’ve been here more than 20 years — and they’ve both supported the programs.
“This is an expensive treatment in the short run; it’s expensive in the sense it takes time and money to train people and to stay adherent to the model and to really do it right,” Nelson said. “If you have the foresight to understand that it is not expensive when you are promoting something that is incredibly valuable and if you grow it and take care of it, it will actually save money in the long run. And it saves lives.”
