Melissa Flanagan Email and Phone Number

My social justice-driven private practice in New York City focuses on improving access to private therapy by accepting several insurance plans and welcoming Medicaid & Medicare recipients, as well as offering a limited number of pro bono spots for people in crisis who may be uninsured or underinsured. Private therapy is too often available only to people who have private insurance or the ability to pay a lot out-of-pocket. I want to change that.As a former homeless shelter director trained in NYC's H+H public healthcare system, I want to serve the unique mental health needs and advocate for the general care needs of people experiencing homelessness, poverty, immigration problems, and institutional racism within the public and private healthcare system, which too often leaves its most vulnerable patients with sub-optimal care and aftercare plans resulting in unnecessary readmissions, adverse outcomes, and preventable trauma. During my 6 years as a clinical social worker and administrator at Kings County Hospital, I led an interdisciplinary team that deconstructed psychiatric readmissions and offered interventions to interrupt a patient's cycle of returning to the hospital multiple times with patterns of recurring crises. Our interventions and outcomes were reported to the US Department of Justice, which monitored the hospital’s overhaul of its behavioral health program following the 2008 death of Esmin Green in the waiting room of the hospital’s psychiatric ER. Prior to working at Kings County, I developed a role for social work on the Consult-Liaison Psychiatry team at Bellevue Hospital. Working alongside a multi-disciplinary team on non-psychiatric units such as OB/GYN, Neurology, Oncology, and the ICU/CCU among others, I learned how unmet mental health needs impact a patient’s ability to recover from medical crises, and how medical crises are resolved optimally only if robust mental health plans are integrated into treatment and aftercare planning. While at Bellevue, I completed training in the Intensive Personality Disorders Clinic, rooted in DBT. I have held additional clinical social work positions in NYC start-up programs focused on integrated care and improving approaches to psychiatric emergencies involving the NYPD. I have spoken on several panels exploring homelessness & mental health and have been a regular guest speaker for psychiatric fellows at the NY State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia, discussing the need for client-centered approaches to mental health treatment in NYC's shelter system.