News Clips
MEDICAID WON’T PAY FOR TEEN’S MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT
By: Rob Low
June 25, 2018
AURORA, Colo. -- Jace Elliott, 15, was born with an extra chromosome. Doctors says his extra chromosome is the reason why he can be sweet one moment and chase his mom with a knife the next moment.
"He was stabbing the door and kept stabbing and hitting the door and telling me he wanted to kill me and he wanted me dead and he hated me," said Elliott's mom Amber Soderstrom, who called 911 while locking herself inside her bathroom.
She said the April 9 incident stemmed from her son's frustration while struggling to put his ...
TIME TO TALK: ‘THERE IS HELP AND HOPE’
By: Alex DeWind
June 21, 2018
Lora Thomas vividly remembers the day: a snowy February afternoon in 2012. She was Douglas County’s coroner then and she was standing in the kitchen of a home in Parker, talking with a father who had lost his son to suicide just hours before.
A year earlier, he told her, his son was an all-star athlete, taking advanced placement classes and in a serious relationship. But when he started smoking marijuana, his grades slipped, the father said, he got kicked off the football team, his girlfriend broke up with him.
Thomas, coroner from ...
SCHOOL TOOLKIT, ONLINE SCREENINGS GEARED TOWARD EARLY INTERVENTION
By: Alex DeWind
June 21, 2018
Mental Health Colorado, the state’s leading mental health advocacy organization, offers two unique tools for the public to promote the prevention and early intervention of mental illness — one geared specifically to youth.
On its website, www.mentalhealthcolorado.org/resources/school, is a School Mental Health Toolkit, which serves as a blueprint for adequate mental health services in schools, the organization says.
The tool kit’s overarching goal is to build social and emotional learning curriculums in all schools, ...
SHOULD YOUR CHILD’S TEACHER ALSO BE THEIR THERAPIST?
By: Sara Israelsen-Hartley
June 20, 2018
WASHINGTON — For years, Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, has been asking people — especially teens — how they feel.
In one survey of more than 22,000 high schoolers, 75 percent of the responses were negative, while only 2 percent were neutral.
“Tired, bored, stressed — that’s how high school students feel,” Brackett said Friday during the annual Mental Health America conference in Washington, D.C. “How many of you feel that’s a recipe for mental health, ...
AFTER CELEBRITY SUICIDES, CALLS TO COLORADO CRISIS HOTLINE SPIKED. THAT SHOWS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH.
By: John Ingold
June 15, 2018
Following the deaths by suicide last week of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, calls to a Colorado suicide-prevention hotline soared.
Colorado Crisis Services experienced a 60 percent increase in call volume over normal levels between Friday night and noon Sunday, said Nourie Boraie, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Human Services. Most of those additional calls came through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which routes all calls from a Colorado area code to the statewide line.
To Andrew Romanoff, the president ...
HOW A QUARTER CAN KEEP STRUGGLING NON-CRIMINALS IN DENVER OUT OF JAIL
By: Michael Roberts
June 14, 2018
Tonight will mark the official launch of Caring 4 Denver, a proposed ballot measure that aims to raise $45 million annually a quarter at a time in order to increase the amount of mental health and substance abuse services in the city. State representative Leslie Herod, one of the concept's main backers, stresses that this funding will also help law enforcement, since people struggling with such issues all too often wind up behind bars even when they haven't committed a crime.
"We need to do something more proactively to ...
TALKING ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH
June 10, 2018
High profile deaths have led to some very candid conversations about mental health lately. Mental Health Colorado President and CEO Andrew Romanoff joins us for a conversation on the topic. Originally appeared on 9News.
CELEBRITY DEATHS CALL FOR HONEST, OPEN CONVERSATION ABOUT SUICIDE
By: Jennifer Kovaleski
June 8, 2018
DENVER -- Most news organizations have an unwritten policy not to cover suicides. It's not because journalists don’t care, we don't want to glamorize or encourage it.
However, the sudden deaths of Kate Spade and now Anthony Bourdain—two celebrities who seemingly had it all and died by suicide—is igniting a flashpoint around a difficult topic.
"I'm glad we're talking about it; I'm sorry for the reason," said Andrew Romanoff, president & CEO of Mental Health Colorado.
Denver7 sat down with Romanoff to ...
NAMI LOOKS “BELOW THE SURFACE” TO COMBAT TEEN SUICIDE
By: Faith Miller
June 6, 2017
When five teenagers at his high school took their own lives in a single semester, Chad Hawthorne knew he had to do something.
Two years ago, the National Alliance on Mental Illness Colorado Springs(NAMI) offered him — and a handful of other El Paso County students who’d been affected by tragedy — a way to help.
The outcome of their efforts is the Below the Surface campaign. Below the Surface seeks to raise teens’ awareness of Colorado’s crisis text line, a free, 24/7 service for people feeling depressed, anxious or ...
THE MENTAL HEALTH BATTLE: HELP AND SUPPORT
June 7, 2018
Mental health is not an easy topic, but it's one that needs to be in the spotlight. Sarah Davidon from Mental Health Colorado.
Originally appeared on 9NEWS.
