The document describes Ahimsa, a mental health retreat in Nevada modeled after Indian ashrams. It is a holistic community for people living with personality disorders, providing alternative treatment including mindfulness, motivational interviewing, and cultivating personal growth over a minimum 90 day stay. The goal is to enhance health and well-being through appreciation and community involvement rather than traditional treatment models. It also discusses plans to address mental health needs in Southern Nevada through expanded facilities and services, peer support, education programs, and integrating treatment into mainstream healthcare.

1. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
Ahimsa
The Behavioral Health Retreat
AAR Nevada, Page 1

2. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
Ahimsa Ashram Retreat
A reclamation community in Nevada
Ahimsa is a Mental Health Retreat modeled on the Indian Ashram
A place to live and breath reclamation for those living with person-
ality disorders.
A reclamation community takes mental and behavioral health away
from traditional post-deinstitutionalization era facilities and in return pro-
vides the community with a full-time holistic and expanded “treatment
mall” making it a bio-psycho-scocial-spiritual harbor for healing.
We build mindfulness and motivational interviewing into the foun-
dation of all that we do and are at this special place and all which we
hope to fulfill during your stays—which begins with a minimum 90 day ac-
cess to the ashram and all of the available activities.
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3. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
We’re not talking up treatment and recovery so much as bringing
cultivation to personal growth and development, honoring and encour-
aging each individual’s path toward becoming whole and integrated.
The purpose is to enhance positive changes in health behavior.
The idea is to introduce a holistic and appreciative approach.
Through an appreciative inquiry initiative, the Mohave Community
Interest Company (MCIC) will engage our community and disrupt stereo-
types and dichotomies. The practitioner/patient and expert/nonprofes-
sional dichotomies are no longer working and no longer meeting peo-
ple’s needs. Our community can replace these old models through de-
mocratic community building. Ultimately, that is how MCIC is defined.
Rather than assisting a guy in a white smock and a clipboard, pa-
tients, clients, consumers, doctors, nurses, case workers, counselors, psy-
chologists and other individuals can come together as a unified body.
Taking the action research model to new places in new ways; taking
strengths, and the “best of what is,” envisioning “what might be,” conceiv-
ing the “ideal process,” and modeling our joint capacity to sustain this
destiny will provide each of us with a truly new and viable approach to
behavioral health care.
Call it ResponsiveCare. Call it Ahimsa
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4. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
MCIC’s ResponsiveCare Nevada-Ahimsa initiative will move for-
ward, first in addressing the current so-called mental health crisis and
second, in setting out to answer the questions surrounding chronic health
care in Southern Nevada. Finally, ResponsiveCare will create an innova-
tive environment wherein the culture of care can be improved and en-
hanced for all Nevadans.
Join In: Start A Movement
Let’s get motivated as a community toward…
Pre-Hospitalization Services, including moving medical clearance
forward for patients in a way that takes the burden off emergency rooms,
making an individual's transfer to a psychiatric facility less taxing on
everybody involved.
Expanding the number of beds in psychiatric care. 150 beds is not
enough in a metropolitan area with a population of 2,062,254.
Post-Hospitalization placement, creating a transitional environment
with MCIC (based on a similar communitarian model to this: http://de-
gageministries.org/resourceoffice.html)
Involving CNAs and RNs in psychiatric home care strategies.
Providing counseling and group therapy.
Enhancing Peer-to-Peer Health Care
The status quo was meant to be broken.
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5. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
___________________________________
Please Visit:
http://creativeindigence.blogspot.com/2013/12/wholeheart-
ed.html
___________________________________
Ideas that make mental health-substance abuse treatment more
readily available really are of the essence, aren’t they? As a community we
can go back to school together with this one—public schools, that is, and
starting programs that, rather than directly dealing with substance abuse
per se, as there is so much controversy over the effectiveness of such
programs, deal instead with mental health hygiene and issues of actualiz-
ing developmental tasks and milestones.
This would encourage a sense of capability, autonomy, identity,
and ego integrity in students.
Heading next into the community, together we take aim at facilitat-
ing transformation for the specific community being served, the families
that make up that community, and thus the individual. We work this out
on the basis that people are better served by counselors and human ser-
vices professionals and the community development projects that move
us all forward.
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6. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
Solving problems independent of a real context has failed.
Somewhere along the line, social problems became the responsi-
bility of the individual and laying responsibility down in that way has cre-
ated huge masses of individuals in need rather than huge masses of in-
dividuals thriving with health advantages and personal success. Em-
ployment Assistance Programs we are told, for example, are there to help
us, but in reality they're just helping corporations keep health care costs
down. In the end we all pay in a variety of other ways. If employees drop
out of work because of substance abuse problems, they are then faced
with waiting lists to limited public treatment programs and other set-
backs. All this has achieved is an increase in social isolation and home-
lessness rather than the so-called recovery that was supposedly the pur-
pose of this failed health care arrangement in the first place. The wrong
people are making money and the right people are not being served.
People need to matter more than politics and it is definitely an issue of
policies over people once again.
How we balance these ideas against the fact that resources are de-
pleting and that substance abuse is costly is also of the essence.
There are concrete ways to bridge the gap between the peer-to-
peer recovery approach that spurred substance abuse treatment models
and current research and clinical practice that would improve services to
the addicted. The evidence-based practice movement seems, at least in
part, to be one real answer. The other part to the treatment puzzle is that
overall funding for substance abuse services will hopefully increase due
to implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act.
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7. Peter Koufos
August 29, 2015
Better integration of treatment into the mainstream of general
health care, greater reform provisions, and a shift of services away from
residential and stand-alone programs toward outpatient programs and
newer forms of care systems could result in patients gaining better access
to care that is more medically based and person-centered and this is
Ahimsa.
Please explore:
Broekaert, E., Autrique, M., Vanderplasschen, W., & Colpaert, K.
(2010). ‘The human prerogative’: a critical analysis of evidence-based and
other paradigms of care in substance abuse treatment. Psychiatric Quar-
terly, 81(3), 227-238.
From Amazon:
AAR Nevada, Page 7