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Dr. Nadia Richardson-Johnson is a professor, diversity consultant as well as Founder and CEO of the Black Women’s Mental Health Institute (BWMHI). She serves with a personal understanding of what mental health patients battle.

Johnson’s been vocal and vulnerable about being diagnosed with “high functioning, rapid cycling, bipolar two,” which is characterized as experiencing four or more episodes of mania or depression in a year’s timeframe.

Her diagnosis came after a collaborative conversation between her medical team – including her counselor, psychiatrist, and internal medicine physician. “I gave all three of them permission to talk to each other, and when they did, they all kind of came together (with a diagnosis),” said Johnson.

Johnson and other Birmingham-area medical professionals encourage members of the Black community to be more open about their mental health. There’s still a negative stigma associated with mental illness in the Black community and that stigma is hindering our acknowledgement and healing.

Adezza DuBose, licensed professional counselor and founder of Iman Healing Journey (Iman means faith), said her tea, is “educating and we’re also advocating. We’re doing the best that we can for clients in general, especially Black people, because we are still just down at the bottom when it comes to mental health (care). We still don’t take it as serious as we need to (because) there’s still so much stigma and shame associated with it.”

“We need community. We need to seek some type of help from somebody that doesn’t know me, so I know there are no biases (knowing) I have a different place outside of my home or outside of wherever that I’m experiencing this trauma. I have somewhere else I can go to release all this mess that’s on me,” said DuBose.

Read more at BirminghamTimes.com.

New Jersey’s development of the START (Systemic, Therapeutic, Assessment, Resources, and Treatment) program is similar to efforts made in other states including California, New York and North Carolina. Additionally, the National Center for START Services, an initiative of the University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability, will serve as a collaborative partner in the development of these programs, according to the state Department of Human Services.

North Carolina’s model is a statewide community crisis prevention and intervention program for people ages 6 and up with complex behavioral or mental health needs, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. The program is intended to be a short-term service, lasting from 12 to 18 months depending on the support needs of each person.

“START is recognized for its person-centered, solutions-focused approach that employs positive psychology and other evidence-based practices to address mental health conditions that are too often misdiagnosed, under-diagnosed or undiagnosed among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” Sarah Adelman, the commissioner of the state Department of Human Services, said in a statement.

Positive psychology looks for a person’s strengths and aims to promote resiliency, rather than focusing on their negative or challenging behaviors, according to Dr. Wendy Aita, the co-director of the Rowan-Virtua Regional Integrated Special Needs (RISN) Center who leads the behavioral health services there.

This approach is also less focused on medication and is “much different” than a more medical model or one that is more punitive in looking at challenging behaviors or mental health conditions, according to Aita.

Read more at NJSpotlightnews.org.

Two-thirds of homeless people are experiencing some form of mental health disorder, a large, new review of data on the subject.

The analysis found that men who are homeless are more likely to be battling mental illness than women, although rates were high for both genders compared to the general population.

There are signs that rates of mental illness may be on the rise among homeless populations, especially in the United States and Canada, said researchers led by Rebecca Barry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada.

“The most common mental disorders included substance use disorders, antisocial personality disorders, major depression and general mood disorders,” Barry and colleagues reported April 17 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Barry’s team found that, overall, 67% of homeless people currently have some form of mental illness, while 77% were found to have experienced mental illness at least sometime during their live

Read more at USNews.com.

From the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin offering a mental health resources page to the San Antonio Public Library’s mental health awareness presentation on the signs of anxiety to a private telehealth room where patrons can meet with a counselor via Zoom in North Texas town of Pottsboro, these librarians do their best to help their communities with mental health resources.

The National Library of Medicine’s South Central Region gave the Pottsboro Area Library a $20,000 COVID-19 outreach grant to develop programs to improve health literacy and information access related to the pandemic. In 2021, the American Library Association awarded the Hewitt Public Library a $3,000 grant to create community conversations about mental health.

And more recently, the St. David Foundation, a grantmaking organization for Central Texas, and its partners, Via Hope, a mental health nonprofit, and RAND, a research organization, allocated $1.5 million to eight Central Texas libraries as part of a three-year pilot program that will end in December.

The pilot program is designed to allow mental health programs to flow seamlessly into the library’s community service model. The peer specialist training program provided the initial training for certification using a federal grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration.

This new resources have allowed rural libraries to pitch in and help address the growing mental health need in their communities.

Texas is a state where 98 percent of its 254 counties are designated as Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas, areas where there’s only 1 clinician for 30,000 residents, and the state’s behavioral health worker shortage is expected to grow.

This workforce shortage has prevented private and state-run mental health hospitals from operating at total capacity, created long waitlists for therapy services, and forced many private providers from taking on new clients as the demand has exceeded scheduling capacity.

Elsewhere in Texas, libraries are finding more ways to help their patrons stay healthier.

South of Waco, the Hewitt Public Library has tapped American Library Association funds to create mental health kits, including stress balls and fidget spinners. In far North Texas, the Pottsboro Public Library, located near the Oklahoma border, used funds from the National Library of Medicine’s South Central Region to create a telehealth room for physical and mental health appointments.

Lawmakers have attempted to address the mental health workforce problem in non-metro areas since 70% of Texas counties are rural by incentivizing mental health providers to practice in remote areas and expanding telehealth. However, this is a long-term measure and won’t fix the crisis in the short term.

To address this need, libraries have started to get creative with the resources available to them to continue their role as community centers where people can go and find resources on housing, employment, substance abuse services, and mental health.

Read more at TexasTribune.org.

As the largest 911 call center in Washington, serving 38 police and fire agencies in Pierce County, South Sound 911 has seen a growing number of the nearly one million annual calls they receive involve someone experiencing a mental or behavioral health crisis.

Aiming to better support these callers, the emergency 911 center has launched a first of its kind model that will bring counselors from the state’s 988 mental health hotline to work alongside dispatchers inside its central-Tacoma office. The collaboration aims to make it easier and faster for dispatchers to divert behavioral health calls away from first responders and towards mental health professionals.

Prior to launching the co-location center, 988 workers and their predecessor at the Suicide Prevention Hotline had worked alongside 911 staffers. Dispatchers at 911 regularly made referrals, or “handoffs” to the mental health hotline. But being in separate spaces and operating independently of each other occasionally led to inefficiencies and had limitations, said Dianna Caber, a communications center manager at South Sound 911.

Alongside other challenges, callers could feel like they were being passed between different agencies, possibly worsening their crisis without getting the right care, she said. A person in crisis also may not be aware of the differences between the two numbers or that 988 exists, she said, and be unsure who to call.

Read more at KitsapSun.com.

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Community Health for Asian Americans has been selected as the Partner of the Month for May in celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Community Health for Asian Americans (CHAA) is a non-profit organization committed to improving the quality of life for marginalized communities with special focus on Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities in the Bay Area. CHAA’s envisions a future in which Asian and Pacific Islander communities are healthy both individually and collectively, and empowered to live independent and productive lives.

Some of the programs and services that are currently offered:

• Children and Youth Mental Health Treatment
• Mental Health Treatment for Adults at Risk of Homelessness
• Healthier Richmond’s Youth Leadership
• Substance Abuse Treatment and Empowering Youth Program
• Parenting Skills Program
• Cultural Competency Training

Learn more about Community Health for Asian Americans and its mission to provide community-driven behavioral health services, family support, youth development, and advocacy for the historically underserved API communities in the Bay Area.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.