While rural residents are facing a growing mental health crisis, an initiative to direct them to the help they need is seeing success across the country.

The National Council for Mental Wellbeing’s Mental Health First Aid for Rural Communities works with people not necessarily in the health professions to give them the tools they need to recognize and respond to the signs of mental health or substance use challenges. Once trained, those rural residents can provide critical support to their rural neighbors until professional help is available.

“I took a training in our community, and then my colleague and I wrote a supportive funds grant to bring the program to our community because we felt that it was definitely needed, especially in our rural communities,” said Jamie Hagenbuch, program manager at the Mental Health First Aid at Madison County Rural Health Council in Cazenovia, New York. Her office serves 10 rural counties in central New York between Syracuse and Albany. So far, her office has trained more than 6,000 community members in their area.

“I think rural communities definitely don’t have the resources that cities and urban communities do, so having the initial skills to be able to recognize if somebody’s becoming unwell and how to approach them and know what resources do exist, as well as being able to navigate them to those resources, is critical,” she said.

 About a quarter of people in non-metropolitan counties experienced a mental health condition last year, and an estimated 1.8 million rural residents reported having suicidal thoughts, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. But access to mental and behavioral health care in rural communities is lacking.

In fact, a 2020 study published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science found that nearly two-thirds of rural counties lack access to a mental health professional.

“There is a significant lack of access to specialty mental health care in rural areas in the U.S.,” according to the study by a team of researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health. “It is estimated that as many as 65% of nonmetropolitan counties do not have psychiatrists, and over 60% of rural Americans live in designated mental health provider shortage areas. …Specialty mental health services are scarce in rural areas, which is likely to contribute to these disparities in care.”

Read the full article about the Mental Health First Aid for Rural Communities program by Liz Carey at The Daily Yonder.