Local leaders who work with young people say a generational mental health crisis is looming but not inevitable. To avoid a crisis requires more adequate funding for services – not a new need by any means. The leaders also expressed a need less well-known outside of social service circles: Youth know what they need, and they know what works for them, so providers need to listen more and direct less.

Police responding to a domestic dispute between mother and daughter find a distraught teenager who is cutting herself. A disruptive man in a parking lot appears to be experiencing psychotic delusions. A frantic 911 call comes from a woman worried her husband is suicidal or from someone whose family member has overdosed on drugs.

Last month, Kalamazoo Public Safety Officer Aaron Visser was among 42 Kalamazoo-area police who went through a 40-hour training on 911 calls involving people experiencing a mental-health crisis. Two days after finishing the course, Visser put that training to the test.

A decade ago, two enemies in Kalamazoo put down their guns. Following two straight years of record gun violence in the city, their intervention program remains especially vigilant in helping others decide to disarm – or not pick up a gun in the first place.

Talk therapy can be a highly effective way to treat mental-health issues, helping people to control or eliminate symptoms or behaviors that undermine a person’s well-being. Psychotherapy can help people process trauma or loss, teach coping skills to address depression and/or anxiety, address issues such as eating or substance-abuse disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and help heal broken relationships.

Feeling depressed? Anxious? Stressed out? Join the club. More than one-third of Michiganders reported experiencing symptoms of depression, stress and or anxiety in the previous two weeks, based on a federal Census survey taken in March.