Traumatic Brain Injury and Incarceration: Ending a Vicious Cycle

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.

The Canadian federal government has identified bullying as a national problem. Roots of Empathy, based in Toronto, encourages empathy in elementary kids by having them interact with babies.

The typical surgery for hydrocephalus, a brain swelling disease, often leads to infection. Medical constraints in Uganda inspired a neurosurgeon to create a safer and more effective surgery which is now used in Uganda and the U.S.

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.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.

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.