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Children’s mental health professionals unite

Integrating Professionals for Appalachian Children leverages local resources

By Colleen Kiphart

Photo by John Sattler

 
IPAC Board of Directors, June 2009. Front row (from left): Sherry Shamblin, Cindy Birt, Sue Meeks, Dawn Murray, Liana Flores, Brandi Nance, Karen Montgomery-Reagan. Back row (from left): Andrea Beebe, Dave Hunter, Jane Hamel-Lambert (IPAC President, ex-offico), John Borchard, John Constanzo.

As many parents say—at least in retrospect—children grow up so quickly. Looking back, infancy can seem like a blink. But these first formative years are vitally important. During this time, when development progresses in leaps and bounds, patterns and behaviors begin to form.

The same can be said about the five-year-old service network, Integrating Professionals for Appalachian Children (IPAC), a non-profit network of eight regional health agencies and four Ohio University departments, which aims to streamline mental health delivery for children and their families.

“We have many different disciplines working together, and they are all focused on asking, ‘What does this family need?’” says John Borchard, chair of IPAC’s board of directors.

Jane Hamel-Lambert, Ph.D., IPAC president and OU-COM director of interdisciplinary mental health education, the group’s leaders learned as they went along, and already the organization can boast more than $1 million in external funding. “It’s really starting to gel,” she says.

IPAC’s members attest to the rapid growth of this organization. “I started attending meetings in 2005, and it was very informal.” says Cindy Birt, vice president of the IPAC board and clinical coordinator at the Athens County Family and Children First Council. “But it is just so wonderful to see how we have continued to grow, even in this economy.”

Birt, who works with children between the ages of eight and 18, immediately saw the benefit of IPAC’s commitment to early intervention. “There are so few programs to deal with behavioral disorders before children get to school at the age of five or later,” she says. “With IPAC we can evaluate them at a very young age, and at age three, when public schools begin providing educational services (like preschool and psychological services) we can introduce them into the programs and services to make them successful in school.”

IPAC participants hope that early intervention can prevent the more severe problems she and her colleagues see later on. “I am working with a young man who is 14 and addicted to drugs and alcohol.” Birt says, “His parents both work, and they have health insurance, but it only covers ten sessions a year. You cannot recover from an addiction in ten visits.”  continue

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