From Tele-Psychiatry to Collaboration, Ohio Tries to Reach its Mental Health Deserts

With the promise of community care, psychiatric wards were unlocked 30 years ago. Today, the sickest patients live in squalor.

A unique program at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center is combining prenatal care with psychiatric treatment for low-income women who might otherwise not seek help for mental health issues during pregnancy.

A program in Philadelphia is pioneering new ways to treat the urban wounded. By seeing it as PTSD, and not pointing fingers, the city is using mental health tools to decrease violence and heal communities.

A certain breed of sheep may carry a specific trait that could possibly treat Huntington’s disease. Early trials have shown that mice treated with the chemical compound found in sheep can reactivate motor function.

Veterans using prescription drugs to treat PTSD are now turning to cannabis as an alternative treatment, as it can often cause fewer side effects. Grow for Vets is an organization that helps veterans obtain marijuana free of charge.

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.

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.

Researchers set out to measure the efficacy of a program called Becoming a Man, which seems to be proving that, for all the billions of dollars spent on complicated anti-crime programs, something as simple and cheap as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy seems more effective in reducing crime (and, not unrelated, keeping teenagers in school).

Child First is a program in Connecticut, where staff members deliver home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy to help prevent the detrimental physical and mental effects of toxic stress on children. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.

In the United States 20 percent of prisoners have a mental illness. San Antonio law enforcement and mental health workers pooled their resources and worked together to create a one-stop center for the mentally ill to keep them out of prison.