NewsNow - 09.23.2022

>>> Governor DeWine Awards $7.7 Million for First Responder Wellness

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced today that 20 local first responder agencies will receive a total of $7.7 million to help them boost their staffing levels to ensure thorough coverage for emergency response. The grants represent the second round of the new Ohio First Responder Recruitment, Retention, and Resilience Program. To date, Governor DeWine has awarded $9.4 million to 46 Ohio agencies as part of this program, which supports wellness needs of first responders such as stress and burnout caused by understaffing. A total of approximately $75 million will be awarded to law enforcement agencies, dispatch centers, fire departments, and emergency medical services agencies as part of this program in coming months. Click HERE for a full list of Round 1 and 2 grant recipients.

>>> Open Access Youth Suicide Prevention Book

Youth Suicide Prevention and Intervention: Best Practices and Policy Implications is a new open access book that focuses on the public health crisis of youth suicide and provides a review of current research and prevention practices. The publication was edited by Dr. John Ackerman, director of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Center for Suicide Prevention and Research and Dr. Lisa Horowitz from the National Institute of Mental Health. The book addresses important topics, including suicide epidemiology, suicide risk detection in school and medical settings, critical cultural considerations, and approaches to lethal means safety. This book offers cutting-edge research on emerging discoveries in the neurobiology of suicide, psychopharmacology, and machine learning. It focuses on upstream suicide prevention research methods and details how cost-effective approaches can mitigate youth suicide risk when implemented at a universal level. Chapters discuss critical areas for future research, including how to evaluate the effectiveness of suicide prevention and intervention efforts, increase access to mental health care, and overcome systemic barriers that undermine generalizability of prevention strategies. Finally, the book highlights what is currently working well in youth suicide prevention and, just as important, which areas require more attention and support. The book is intended to be accessible by all audiences – policy makers, researchers, clinicians and advocates. To help further educate on this important topic, Nationwide Children’s Hospital created a toolkit for use on social media, newsletters and website. All you have to do is copy and paste the messages and use the supplied images.

>>> AHA Physician Alliance Poster: Are You Using Destigmatizing Language About Suicide?

Language matters in compassionate care, especially in behavioral health care, and that doesn’t mean just what you say in front of a patient. What you say behind closed doors with co-workers can be the seed for stigma and perpetuate discrimination against a person based on a physical or mental health disorder. The topic of suicide, and the sometimes-stigmatizing language around it, must be handled with compassion. The language you use can be an important factor in whether or not a person decides to seek care. Click HERE to download a new Words Matter poster from the American Hospital Association’s Physician Alliance. Click HERE for more suicide prevention resources from the Alliance.

>>> NIH BRAIN Initiative Launches Projects to Develop Cell Atlases and Molecular Tools for Cell Access

This week the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced two transformative projects supported by the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative: The BRAIN Initiative® Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) and the Armamentarium for Precision Brain Cell Access. These BRAIN 2.0 projects aim to transform our understanding of brain cell types and the precise tools needed to access them, bringing us one step closer to unraveling the complex workings of the human brain. Building on findings from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, BICAN takes the next step in mapping brain cells and circuits across multiple species, with an emphasis on humans. BICAN will support 11 grants projected to total $100 million annually over 5 years. The aim of these awards is to generate a complete reference atlas of cell types in the human brain across the lifespan, which can be shared and used throughout the research community. In parallel, the Armamentarium for Precision Brain Cell Access will support seven grants projected to total $36 million over 3 years in the first project phase. This project will leverage new brain cell census data and advanced technology to build an expanded “armamentarium,” or toolkit, that scientists can use to access specific brain cells and neural circuits in model systems that include both laboratory animals and human tissue specimens. Together with the forthcoming BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales (BRAIN CONNECTS) Network, these large-scale projects promise to transform neuroscience research, illuminating foundational principles governing the circuit basis of behavior and informing new approaches to the treatment of human brain disorders.