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She called the number on her syllabus offering counseling. No one picked up.

March 25, 2024
©Lisa Kurian Philip/WBEZ: Isabelle Dizon contacted her campus counseling center when she hit a low point during her sophomore year of college, but never heard back. Now a junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she hopes the school hires someone at the center to, at the very least, pick up the phone.

High need, low accessibility: Oglethorpe County residents face barriers to mental health care, even as teens and schools are willing to have the conversation

March 25, 2024
©Navya Shukla/The Oglethorpe Echo: Katie Edwards, a counselor at Oglethorpe County Elementary School, helps third-grader Londyn Wilson with a work- sheet during a guidance lesson last month. The lessons are regularly held to guide students' empathy, emotion regulation, perseverance and more.

For many Black sickle cell patients, care must reach deeper

March 14, 2024
©Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian: Sickle cell patient Alexis Tappan, right, is checked out by Rana Cooper on at the Methodist Hospital Cancer Institute and Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. Memphis is home to one of the nation’s largest populations of adults living with sickle cell disease.

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.

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