‘Rental sisters' for Japan's Reclusive Young Men

In Japan, an organization called New Start employs women that help men who are withdrawn from society. These men, called hikikomori, are often experiencing mental health issues, and cannot leave their homes. That’s where New Start’s rent-a-sister program comes in. These women spend months, sometimes years, with these men, building trust, giving advice, and adjust to society. The organization also provide halfway houses for these men, with 80% successfully re-entering society as independent individuals.

Healing trauma has never been an easy process but programs like Healing Hurt People help to promote recovery in traumatized, angry young men. This program, in partnership with local medical services, aims to provide therapy in place of violence, which would only cause more trauma down the road. Those who stick with the program have found great success in overcoming their pasts.

Sometimes just having someone to talk to can help those who are suffering from depression. The Friendship Bench program in NYC borrows an idea from Harare, Zimbabwe, where healthcare workers—affectionately called Grannies—sit and consult with patients on benches outside of healthcare clinics. The Grannies help people discuss their issues and have had a measurably positive impact on those they’ve reached. In New York, the Friendship Benches connect individuals to peer mentors willing to listen across the city.

The concept of peer-to-peer support has been leveraged by organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous for decades; but for perhaps the first time, health care systems are leveraging this method to help treat patients with mental illness. Non-profit Via Hope provides training and certification for peer support specialists who go to work in health clinics and hospitals to provide support, counseling, and resources for others suffering from a wide range of mental illnesses. They are already proving as, if not more effective than traditional case managers at helping keep patients out of psychiatric hospitals.

Healing Hurt People (HHP), the program that helped save his life, now employs men like Jermaine McCorey - men who used to be a part of a violent life on the streets of Philadelphia - to reach out to boys and young men in the emergency department and help get them through empathy and personalized support. HHP's goal is to help young people recognize the role trauma has played in shaping their lives, to respect and honor their experience and to help them avoid fueling the cycle of violence.

The Alternatives to Violence Project, an international nonprofit, provides workshops around conflict resolution, personal growth, and other social skills to people experiencing incarceration. While a large-scale organization, individual prisons have the agency to implement the workshops. In Washington’s Pierce county, they tailor their workshops for veterans experiencing incarceration, teaching community-building, self-reflection, listening, and de-programming aggression and violence.

Making personal connections supports mental health and wellbeing. The San Francisco-based nonprofit, Sidewalk Talk, trains volunteers to go out and engage on a personal level with individuals in underserved communities. The volunteers simply listen and provide empathy, a valuable resource for those who might not have access to mental health care.

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.

The Dallas County deflection program diverts low-level, non-violent offenders (many experiencing homelessness and mental illness) away from jail and toward voluntary mental health, substance abuse, and stabilization services. The program served 918 people last fiscal year and started a newer eight-bed pilot that connected 11 clients with services in its first month of operation.

Alaska has begun certifying peer support specialists with a free 40-hour training. Peer support specialists use their own experiences with mental health conditions or substance use to guide others dealing with similar issues. The state has certified 43 people, including 12 Indigenous traditional peer support specialists. Trainings teach peer supporters about different coping skills and how to help clients deal with a mental health diagnosis and set healthy boundaries. They also cover legal and ethical issues in peer support. The specialists model recovery and offer support without telling people what to do.