How to help someone struggling with mental illness

Naloxone could be the secret to curing New England's heroin consumption. Trying to expand access to the life-saving overdose antidote is the real obstacle.

Bangladesh has often struggled maintaining safety in the workplace. But a new effort ensures that Bangladeshi workers are trained about how to better follow security and safety restrictions to create a safer working environment.

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.

The biggest killer of children in Bangladesh is drowning, especially among low income families. The injury prevention center, CIPRB, has started swimming education programs and teaching young kids rescue techniques.

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.

New York City suffered from fires that erupted in overcrowded, run-down apartments. Then the city sleuthed through residential records and found that landlords who foreclosed let their properties fall apart and ignored safety-code violations. Greater Toronto wants to expand upon New York City’s method by using transportation surveys, census data and computer data to build transit lines.

LAPD's special team, the Mental Evaluation Unit, is teaming up police officers with mental health clinicians to better approach and address individuals suffering from a mental health crisis. Rather than sending them to jail - where resources are limited and a vicious cycle often results - the teams help ensure patients get the medical care they need, preventing brushes with the law and county millions of dollars and freed up thousands of hours of patrol time. Their model is being replicated nation-wide.

A school in New Zealand took the rules out of recess. They found that when the kids were mentally engaged during play time activities they were less likely to have problems, such as bullying within the classroom.

In Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, an organization called Save Our Streets Crown Heights (S.O.S.) is taking steps to disrupt violence. The organization is modeled after Chicago's violence interrupters, which employ people from the neighborhood to connect with those most at-risk and disrupt conflicts and retalitory violence.