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A 12-year-old killed herself at a Spokane hospital that recently closed its youth psychiatric unit

April 25, 2025
Asha Joseph spoke at her 12-year-old sister's funeral on Tuesday. Sarah Niyimbona had been receiving psychiatric treatment at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center intermittently for eight months when she died by suicide at the hospital. Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest

Language lives on for tribes in Oklahoma despite determined erasure attempts

April 16, 2025
Martie Woothtakewahbitty teaches her students how to speak the Comanche language in a classroom at the Life Ready Center in Lawton on September 26, 2024. Abigail Siatkowski /KOSU

Mental health advocates fight stigma to curb conditions that can kill new moms in Georgia

April 15, 2025
The Dekalb-Gwinnett OB/GYN practice was the first in Georgia to sign up to participate with PEACE for Moms, a perinatal psychiatry and education program that consults with doctors, nurses, midwives and other clinicians across the state whose patients need help for a pregnancy related mental health condition. (WABE/Jess Mador)

Law enforcement enlists mental health experts to help save lives — ‘a paradigm shift in policing’

©Riley Bunch/GPB: News Officers from law enforcement departments that have already implemented co-responder units gather at the Georgia Capitol on May 9 to watch Gov. Brian Kemp sign Senate Bill 403.
©Riley Bunch/GPB: News Officers from law enforcement departments that have already implemented co-responder units gather at the Georgia Capitol on May 9 to watch Gov. Brian Kemp sign Senate Bill 403.

Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB), June 8, 2022, by Riley Bunch: SAVANNAH, Georgia — Sometimes when Savannah Police Department officers are called to a scene of a crisis, those who respond may not look like police at all.

Officers arrive in an unmarked Ford Explorer, donning a simple blue polo and gray khaki pants.

Their SUVs offer more comfort than the usual police police vehicle, with only a thin partition separating the front and back passengers. The seats are soft, not hard molded plastic.

No flashing lights line the top of the vehicles, and the department’s logo isn’t emblazoned on the side.

It’s part of an effort started in 2020 in the coastal city to respond to the growing mental health crisis — a way of de-escalating a tense situation without anyone getting hurt or the person being sent to jail, as was common in the past.

“We have a very subdued look because in Savannah, a lot of people don’t want other people to see them with the police,” said officer Julie Cavanaugh. “So the person doesn’t feel like that they’re going to jail or that they’re encountering a police officer that’s in a full uniform.”

Read more at GPB here.