Giving Compass' Take:

• Scott Fadness describes the steps that Fishers, Indiana has taken to push back against mental illness and how other communities can follow suit. 

• How can funders partner with organizations to help increase access to mental health services? What community buy-in is needed to make systemic change in this area?

• Learn how Virginia is working to de-stigmatize mental illness. 

According to the World Health Organization, one in four people worldwide will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Mental illness does not discriminate. It's not relegated to the inner city. It doesn't favor people of a certain age. It transcends demographic and socio-economic lines. And too often, mental illness manifests itself in suicide: It's the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, just behind influenza, pneumonia and kidney disease. And, as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports, for every suicide there are 25 attempts.

The scope of the issue didn't hit home in our safe, suburban community -- we top Money magazine's list of best places to live in the United States -- until 2014, when we began looking at some troubling numbers in a systematic way. Fishers, Ind., has a population of nearly 92,000. In the last 20 years, we have had only three murders, but in the last three years alone 31 of our residents have died by suicide. Another three to four times as many have attempted suicide but were rescued by first responders. To further exacerbate our risk, Fishers matches nearly every indicator for communities that have experienced a school shooting.

So we asked ourselves a simple question: if we were to marshal our collective resources toward the issue of mental illness, what could we do and what should we do? The answer, and the effort over the last three years, has been substantive and systemic.

The city, our school district, clinicians, religious leaders and public-safety officials have accomplished 97 percent of the tactical objectives that we set out to accomplish. In one school year, the number of students who received mental health services increased more than 1,000 percent. Our public-safety officials report that immediate detentions of those at risk of hurting themselves or others have decreased by more than 30 percent since 2015. We are working diligently to change the culture and stigma around mental illness. We are committed to creating a community that encourages those living in quiet despair to get the help that they need.

We've learned a lot on our three-year journey. If you have a desire to address mental health in your own community, here are some pragmatic, actionable steps to help you get started:

  • Inventory your community relationships and leverage them.
  • Understand the problem.
  • Become competent in response.
  • Talk about it.
  • Be substantive and systemic.
  • Engage with students.

Read the full article about pushing back against mental illness by Scott Fadness at Governing Magazine.