How Reflective Supervision Sessions Help Teachers Cope with the Stress of the Job

A strategy for stopping widespread depression in developing countries should be as obvious as one for combatting epidemics. A new strategy aims to downshift jobs to local workers to act as peer therapists.

Due to recent brain development research, educators are working to add more math education into pre-school and kindergarten classes. Studies show that children of this age are actually extremely receptive to numbers and learning geometry.

There is a mental-health capacity crisis gripping Washington state. The area’s response approach, crafted over two decades, centers on a set of intensive outpatient and early-intervention programs aimed at preventing hospitalizations.

Preschoolers in the U.S. who misbehave are increasingly being expelled. In Connecticut, trained counselors educated teachers about how to deal with emotionally traumatized kids which reduced expulsions.

Different programs in various nations are training ordinary people and creating community groups to effectively satisfy the mental health needs of their communities. In many of these regions, "treatment gaps" – where there are little to no mental health treatment plans or resources – exist, but this new informal infrastructure helps to fill that.

Preparing the young for elementary education is a priority to nurture reading and social skills. For 16 years, Tulsa Oklahoma has instituted a state funded preschool, staffed with teachers trained in early education. Tulsa’s Pre-K initiative has shown that their children are more prepared for literacy skills and math; however, maintaining the positive results is a long-term challenge.

Veterans who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder number about one-fourth of military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, roughly 500,000 veterans so far. Inmates in prisons nationwide train dogs as companions for these war veterans, providing a sense of healing for all.

In Houston, TX, many individuals with mental illnesses cycled in and out of emergency care while arrested or incarcerated. Houston’s police department has decreased the number of incarcerated who have mental illness by opening a division to mental health called the Chronic Consumer Stabilization Unit. Now Milwaukee seeks to replicate Houston’s results.

Milwaukee County’s mental health system put more resources in expensive emergency care rather than invest in programs that offer continual care. As a result, Milwaukee County identifies nine solutions from other cities that have had success in repairing mental health systems. Solutions include the ending of reliance on emergency care, expand community support programs, change laws, and supportive housing.

Universal preschool is a policy that is often hard to pass on voter referendums. But, as evidenced by examples in Detroit and New York, such an investment means that more children would do well in kindergarten, fewer would need special education or other extra help and down the line, fewer would drop out of high school, end up unemployed — or in jail.