New mental health tool to help communities

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) — One local non-profit group is making it easier to find mental health statistics in your community.

Mental Health Colorado created the data dashboard. You can select your county, like El Paso County. Then you can scroll over each picture to see the numbers for where you live. For example, 12 percent of residents in El Paso County reported eight or more days of poor mental health. That’s higher than the state average.

We sat down with the CEO to talk about how you can use this new tool.

“Now we put all this data in one place so we can see how we’re doing when it comes to suicide rates, binge drinking, opioid overdoses, rates of depression, number of mental health professionals per capita,” said Andrew Romanoff, the President and CEO of Mental Health Colorado.

“We want to create a little friendly competition so that if Teller County is doing better than El Paso County, folks here in El Paso will pressure their county commissioners or their school board members, or other decision makers to make these sorts of investments in better mental health care,” he added.

Anderson Miller is the new Pikes Peak Regional Coordinator for Mental Health Colorado. He talked about a big issue we face in the Pikes Peak Region.

“The number one stat, is that El Paso County is leading the state in suicide rates,” said Miller. “The first step in understanding the problem is looking at the data and being able to sift through that data to find actionable points.”

Click here to visit the website and try out the dashboard for your community.

This article originally appeared on KKTV 11 News.