May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a critical opportunity to combat stigma around mental illness and draw attention to promising solutions taking shape in Michigan.
The Health Fund’s Behavioral Health program works with organizations, institutions, and communities around the state to strengthen access to behavioral health care, promote collaboration, and provide support where and when it’s most needed.
As part of this strategy aimed at meeting the behavioral health needs of children and teens — a group that’s faced concerning increases in mental illness in recent years — the Health Fund works intentionally with partners to strengthen support in schools.
One notable example is Corewell Health of West Michigan’s School Blue Envelope program, which received a grant from the Health Fund to implement a transformative program in middle and high schools.
Supporting students to reduce suicides
Over the past four years, suicide rates among children and adolescents have steadily climbed, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the pervasive influence of social media. This alarming trend prompted a declaration of a national emergency on child and adolescent mental health by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children’s Hospital Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October 2021.
Corewell Health Foundation West Michigan’s innovative School Blue Envelope program is a suicide prevention and crisis response protocol, which provides school personnel with a structured approach to identify and assist students in crisis.
At the heart of the Blue Envelope program is the S.A.F.E. protocol, which stands for:
- Stay with the student in crisis
- Access help
- Feelings-validate them, and
- Eliminate lethal means.
When a student is identified as being in crisis, trained responders — including counselors, administrators, and social workers, carry out a detailed suicide risk assessment and safety plan. This plan includes outlining next steps and providing essential community resources to both the student and their family. The goals of the program are to increase preventative conversations with students and increase appropriate referrals to emergency services.
Spreading successful models
The reception to the School Blue Envelope program has been profoundly positive, and in its initial phase the program has already trained over 15,500 school personnel across 230 schools in 65 school districts within 13 West Michigan counties.
In 2023, Corewell Health secured an additional Health Fund grant to expand the Blue Envelope model into the collegiate sphere with the Collegiate Blue Envelope program. We’re excited to see the additional impacts stemming from this expansion in the years to come.
Through these proactive measures, Corewell Health and its partners are making significant strides in safeguarding the mental health of children and youth, while providing a blueprint for effective suicide prevention and crisis intervention in educational settings.
Visit our Behavioral Health program page to learn more about our strategy our grantmaking, and our work with schools and other partners across Michigan.