Teen's death leads to lasting suicide prevention project

Assertive community treatment teams working through outreach-centered programs in Maricopa County have become an industry standard for treating those with persistent and severe mental illnesses who have recently been incarcerated. They provide a long-term approach, aiming to halt a cycle of incarceration and hospitalization by focusing on underlying issues such as what caused the police interaction and incarceration.

In Uganda, religious leaders and anti-gay individuals have been very vocal against the LGBTI community and have disowned many LGBTI religious leaders. This has led some of these leaders to publicly come out and advocate for others and speak of their own experiences, showing the possibility of being LGBTI and religious.

Peer to peer programs have existed since the 1980s. These programs pair up a person with mental health illness, with one another. The concept, is relatively new in the prison systems, and is gaining traction in states like Pennsylvania.

To prevent suicides, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the National Shooting Sports Association are teaming up for an education initiative to raise awareness around suicide by firearms. The NSSF will lend the cause credibility against gun owners who may fear that this is gun control. Starting in four states with high suicide incidence, the program plans to scale nationally.

Non-violent offenders arrested during mental health episodes in Davidson County are sent to Mental Health Court rather than criminal court. Through this court, they are connected to safety net services such as housing, medication assistance, and therapy.

When suicide rates began to show a steady incline in Oregon, researchers found that this strongly correlated with a population that had been evicted from their homes. In Washington County, the supervisor of the county’s public health program who is also the county’s epidemiologist, began aggregating data that allowed her to develop a list of risk factors that were distributed to crises intervenors as well as make alterations to eviction notices.

In several small rural towns in Texas, mental health professionals from Texas Tech are offering telemedicine counseling to make up for a lack of counselors available in local middle and high schools. The Governor's office has now asked the successful school districts to develop a training program for teachers in other Texas districts in order to scale the model.

Medical professionals throughout the United States are starting to implement mental health screenings during routine care in order to better assess those at risk of suicide. Using a combination of health records and questionnaires to flag which patients should have continued follow-ups, clinics and primary care specialists prioritization of suicide intervention is already showing significant results.

The South Central Leadership Academy was started in Los Angeles by a college student who believes that gun violence survivors like him should lead the community response in finding solutions to violence. Its first year of paying more than a dozen student survivors to learn community organizing skills succeeded in attracting funding to expand to Nashville, Baltimore, and Atlanta. COVID-19 put the latter two expansions on hold, but LA and Nashville continued with well-attended classes learning remotely. Founder Marco Vargas hopes to turn this startup into a national network of youth leadership academies.

To enhance rural access to healthcare in Nigeria, the Parkers Mobile Clinic partners with local volunteers, healthcare professionals, educators, and community development advocates to identify and remedy unique healthcare gaps. Outreach programs are then designed to provide localized mental health support, nutritional counseling, and other reproductive health services.