Teen's death leads to lasting suicide prevention project

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.

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.

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.

With pressures of depression, anxiety, and suicide on the rise, teenagers in the United States are challenged to find the comfortable outlet and accessibility for emotional support. The Crisis Text Line offers a counseling service through mobile texting, which reduces the shame that can occur when approaching an in-person counselor, and expands access to professional mental health counseling nationwide.

Millions of families of arrested individuals do not know what to do to help, how to obtain a lawyer, or what the process entails in the court system. Created by Albert Cobarrubius Justice Project, participatory defense is a type of community organizing that teaches and empowers people who face criminal charges. Individuals know how to work with attorneys in order to navigate the system and ultimately feel equipped to become drivers of their own change.

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.

In India, 620 million people openly defecate outdoors, causing harm to hygiene, sanitation, food, and water resources. The president of India funded an initiative to build public toilets for the people in his country, but the people did not use them because of traditions and behaviors. The Total Sanitation Campaign is starting to change villagers’ minds by having local leadership persuade those who resist the toilets by holding community activities and creating special committees to maintain the sanitation.

Civic leaders in the U.S. struggle to effectively help their distressed neighborhoods. East Lake, Atlanta, created a replicable model that mixes residents of differing socio-economic status, and focuses on education and health in the area.

Global social and economic problems are difficult to change. However, fan-activism fuels the interests of fans of popular young adult fiction. Books such as Harry Potter and the Hunger Games have inspired activist groups that raise awareness of global hunger, reading, and relief supplies to impoverished nations, among others. Being a fan has served as a bridge to become politically active and solve the world’s problems.