Integrity House, one of New Jersey’s largest licensed not-for-profit providers of substance use disorder treatment and mental health services with programs in Kearny, Newark, Secaucus, Toms River, Morris Plains, and Paramus, has been awarded a one year, $85,000 grant from the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey (HFNJ) to support the Creative Arts Initiative in Integrity House’s Newark and Secaucus residential programs. The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey focused throughout 2023 on addressing mental health in the greater Newark community; this year-long effort led to them making over $3 million in grants to charities and non-profit organizations working to address this issue.
Integrity House’s Creative Arts Initiative began in July 2023 to provide emotional relief to individuals receiving care for substance use disorder and mental illness through creative enrichment, including bibliotherapy, creative arts workshops, community arts programs, and more. Studies have found art therapy to be an effective treatment of mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, which commonly co-occur in individuals with substance use disorder.
“This grant from the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey will have a significant benefit for individuals seeking to overcome addiction,” said Robert J. Budsock, President & CEO of Integrity House. “Addiction treatment is a multi-pronged process that not only deals with substance use itself but the underlying mental health conditions that led to addiction, were worsened by or were brought on by addiction. In that, art therapy is an extremely powerful tool in treating the mental health of those who come into our program. We at Integrity House know the importance of and aim to provide whole-person care, and we are grateful to the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey for this grant, which will allow us to continue treating people for all the issues that ripple out of substance use disorder.”“Since piloting the Creative Arts Initiative in two of our Newark residential programs, we have seen correlations between the availability of creative arts services and positive clinical outcomes, including retention, program completion, and abstinence,” said Evan Weiss, Creative Arts Coordinator of Integrity House. “We are extremely excited that the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey has supported our efforts to expand this initiative so that we can replicate these results in all of our Newark-based programs.”