The Washington Heights Community Service (WHCS) is a comprehensive community-based program for individuals with severe mental illness who live in Northern Manhattan. The Service consists of a 22-bed inpatient unit at NYSPI and two outpatient clinics located in the communities of Washington Heights (Audubon Clinic) and Inwood (Inwood Clinic) that serve approximately 1,000 patients.

The inpatient unit treats a wide variety of Axis I Disorders, with a majority of patients carrying a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder (e.g., Schizophrenia or Schizoaffective Disorder) or a major affective disorder (e.g., Bipolar Disorder or Major Depression). Given the demographics of Northern Manhattan and the large number of immigrants from Latin American countries, particularly the Dominican Republic, the unit is run on a bilingual basis and many staff members are from Spanish speaking countries. All therapeutic modalities are utilized in the treatment of our patients, including pharmacotherapy, individual psychotherapy, group therapy and family therapy. Moreover, the staff has access to the vast expertise of faculty of the Columbia University Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, as well as to the medical and surgical services of New York Presbyterian Hospital in order to diagnose and treat medical conditions that arise in our patients.

In addition to providing state of the art psychiatric care, the WHCS inpatient unit serves as one of the major psychiatric teaching units in the New York Presbyterian Hospital system. Psychiatric residents, medical students, nursing students, social work interns, and occupational therapy students all rotate through the service. Supervision is provided by the members of permanent staff in each of the foregoing disciplines, who work in multidisciplinary teams, along with the students, that are dedicated to providing the best care possible to some of the least fortunate members of our society who are often in the greatest need of high quality care. Most patients discharged from the inpatient unit are referred to one of the two WHCS outpatient clinics, where they continue to receive culturally sensitive, comprehensive psychiatric care from psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, many of whom have faculty appointments in the Columbia University Medical School.