The Sylvia Brafman Mental Health Center

We are laser focused on the family dynamic and are adamant that family members must be heavily involved in treatment. Ben Brafman’s in depth experience with family therapy solidifies our belief that while the entire family gets sick from mental illness, the family can also recover with the right support and be better than ever before.

When patients come to treatment, they are broken and sometimes they don’t quite realize how broken they are. At their core, they yearn to be part of something bigger, feel connected to the people in their lives, have a purpose and feel optimistic about their future. Our goal is to restore a patient’s mental condition so as to give them the appropriate balance to move forward in life and position them to succeed personally and professionally.

With respect to addiction, it is our position that addicts are in a place of great suffering and that they contend with a mental illness which must be treated accordingly. This illness is uniquely intertwined in mental, physical and spiritual factors that are both genetic and the result of a self-centered worldview often impacted by trauma. Clinically speaking, the foundation of addiction is grounded in obsessive compulsive thinking. Therefore, we believe in treating the mental illness and supplementing it with the 12-steps, versus dividing up addicts and non-addicts into two distinct categories.

Actively listening to the individual and challenging his or her belief system is at the core of our clinical philosophy. Patients often cannot differentiate the true from the false, and our approach is to confront the flawed patterns of thinking in an empathetic and caring manner. Simultaneously, we identify and address any chemical imbalances that can be best addressed through medication therapy.

We believe it is critical to be able to measure the success of treatment. This provides a benchmark for recovery and holds us accountable. We measure success not so much by how the patient does in treatment, but how the family and patient recover progressively throughout and post-treatment. Some of the factors we emphasize include whether the family is operating as a unit (Is the marriage better? Are the siblings talking?), the patient is sticking to the post-treatment plan, the internal “chatter” starts to become more muted, there is a renewed hope and vision of a path forward in life and the patient starts to give off a different energy to those around him or her.