In Foster Care, Treating the Trigger

It’s now common for youth to remain in foster care or residential treatment for years. For troubled or victimized children in need, assistance at home is often more effective than foster placement.

The foster care system is widely acknowledged to be 'broken', and to ignore those who age out of the system. A program in Memphis is improving the lives of at-risk youths by working to reunite them with their original families.

A strategy for stopping widespread depression in developing countries should be as obvious as one for combatting epidemics. A new strategy aims to downshift jobs to local workers to act as peer therapists.

Child mortality rates in third-world countries are often shockingly high. But they are gradually decreasing due to efforts that target contagious diseases and more widespread health education.

There is a mental-health capacity crisis gripping Washington state. The area’s response approach, crafted over two decades, centers on a set of intensive outpatient and early-intervention programs aimed at preventing hospitalizations.

Research in the U.S. suggests that a small class size is not enough but in combination with teacher training it leads to a change in achievement.

Different programs in various nations are training ordinary people and creating community groups to effectively satisfy the mental health needs of their communities. In many of these regions, "treatment gaps" – where there are little to no mental health treatment plans or resources – exist, but this new informal infrastructure helps to fill that.

In Houston, TX, many individuals with mental illnesses cycled in and out of emergency care while arrested or incarcerated. Houston’s police department has decreased the number of incarcerated who have mental illness by opening a division to mental health called the Chronic Consumer Stabilization Unit. Now Milwaukee seeks to replicate Houston’s results.

Milwaukee County’s mental health system put more resources in expensive emergency care rather than invest in programs that offer continual care. As a result, Milwaukee County identifies nine solutions from other cities that have had success in repairing mental health systems. Solutions include the ending of reliance on emergency care, expand community support programs, change laws, and supportive housing.

Fixing the education system in the country requires addressing the problem of student motivation to endure and succeed in school. Pathways to Education is a Toronto-based program designed to keep at-risk kids in school. It offers four different kinds of support: counseling, academic, social and financial, all of which contribute to a 46 percent decrease in the student drop-out rate.