Psychiatric Emergency & Crisis Services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to any person in NH who may be experiencing psychiatric distress. If you are dealing with an immediate crisis, please
- call 911, or
- call the national suicide hotline at 1-800-273-TALK or
- visit the emergency room at your local hospital, or
- contact your local community mental health center.
For less urgent situations, please contact your local community mental health center, or your local peer support agency. Several of these agencies offer "Warm Lines" which provide telephone peer-to-peer support, understanding, sympathy, and advice.
The Bureau of Behavioral Health (BBH) seeks to promote respect, recovery, and full community inclusion for adults, including older adults, who experience a mental illness and children with an emotional disturbance. By law and rule, BBH is mandated to ensure the provision of efficient and effective services to those citizens who are most severely and persistently disabled by mental, emotional, and behavioral dysfunction. To this end, BBH has apportioned the entire state into community mental health regions. Each of the ten regions has a BBH contracted Community Mental Health Center and many regions have Peer Support Agencies.
Community Mental Health Centers
Community Mental Health Centers are private full service clinics which offer a wide variety of programs such as individual and group therapy, medications, and symptom management. They also provide special intensive services to persons who meet the BBH eligibility requirements because they have a severe mental illness or emotional disability. These services are defined in He-M 426.
Peer Support Agencies
The Peer Support Agencies (PSAs) are private not-for-profit agencies that have contracted with BBH. PSAs provide help to people with mental illness who are 18 years of age or older and who identify themselves as a recipient, a former recipient, or a person who is at significant risk of becoming a recipient of publicly funded mental health services.
Peer support is provided by people with a mental illness and consist of supportive interactions based on shared experiences, trust, respect, and mutual concern. These services are intended to assist people with their recovery from mental illness. Peer Support Agencies accomplish this by providing choice, using non-medical approaches to help, sharing decision making, encouraging informed decisions, and challenging self-perceived limitations. Activities vary from PSA to PSA but are likely to include face-to-face and telephone peer support; routine contacts to check on a person's well-being; monthly educational events; wellness training; and crisis respite, a 24 hour, short-term, non-medical crisis program.
Community Connections
NH Mental Health Services Locator
An on-line resource that provides information about services in NH.
The National Hopeline Network
Call 1-800-SUICIDE (784-2433) for help with situations involving suicide.
ServiceLink Resource Center
Call 1-866-634-9412 for help for elders and adults with disabilities who need long term care, caregiver support, home care services, wellness education, prescription drug options, financial planning and more.
NH Suicide Prevention Plan
provides recommendations for awareness and access to quality mental health services.
National Alliance on Mental Illness - NH Chapter
For support and education for Family Members call 1-800-242-6264.
|