The Proactive Prevention Plan

Long Story Short

A Public Health Crisis

The Proactive Plan will create individual mindsets, community protocols, and institutional policies that drive early recognition and provide effective interventions to reduce harm from mental illness and psychological injury (trauma).

The Hope For Us Network came together because we mutually look at underserved mental health care as a public health crisis. Rates of illness, injury, and harm are not only persisting but surging and accelerating.

Moreover, we realized that existing tools are reactive, only offering incremental impact. We need dramatic transformational change to reduce harm and halt acceleration.

The Proactive Prevention Plan is a first-of-its-kind solution to reduce rates of harm by disrupting the highest risk factors for mental health crises.

We will use innovative ENGAGEMENT and EDUCATION programs to ACTIVATE a revolutionary coalition of ALLIES who will facilitate the transformation of community spaces and institutions to embrace, adopt, and embed proactive practices.

TOGETHER WE CAN transform mental health to support all of us.

What is so unique about this solution?

The Transformation Triangle

We developed a comprehensive plan that addresses the massive scope of deficiencies in mental health care.

Traditional approaches to reforming mental health make incremental improvements such as improving services and treatment or breaking down stigma at the level of individual persons. These approaches often lead to strategies that isolate issues into silos such as race, gender, and economics.

Mental health care deficiencies are systemic and embedded across a vast web of interconnected intersections of cultures, communities, and institutions.

To effectively address any one issue is to encounter an intertwined series of compounding factors that maintain or perpetuate the problems.

We named the strategy to confront these interconnected factors simultaneously the Transformation Triangle.

TOGETHER WE CAN transform mental health. When you join our education experiences, you will learn why we call it the Transformation Triangle and its application.

Why do this now?

The Crisis Persits and Escalates

Harm from underserved mental health has been a nearly silent public crisis for generations. This silence results from the culture of concealment that has shaped how we approach mental health as individuals, among our community spaces, and within institutions.

Mental health has no prejudice. Globally, the World Health Organization indicates that more than 700,000 people die by suicide each year. In America, the CDC tracks that more than 47,000 people die by suicide each year.

This crisis has not only persisted for generations, often in the shadows, but rates of harm are accelerating right before our eyes. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, nearly 130 people die by Suicide each day as of 2020. That number is UP from 121 persons per day in 2016.

In Mental Health America's annual national survey, rates of illness, depression, self-harm, ideation, and attempts have increased dramatically year over year since 2017. The Covid-19 pandemic only intensified mental health challenges across all ages, groups, and ethnicities.

The World Health Organization projects that, by 2032, Mental Illnesses like depression will be the leading cause of disability on the planet.

Underserved mental health is a public crisis. Successful intervention in this public health crisis begins with declaring a demarcation - to define this moment where we make peace with the past and commit our energies and passions to a new course of action.

TOGETHER WE CAN halt this accelerating pace. We can drive back and reduce the rates of harm!

What changes does being proactive on mental health create?

Concealment Culture

The way our best tools for suicide prevention and mental health care are structured and utilized is reactive.

Tools like Lifeline, hospitalization, training like Mental Health First AID, Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) focus on persons reaching a crisis point.

This reactive posture is due to the culture of concealment that shapes how we engage mental health personally, socially, and institutionally.

CONCEALMENT CULTURE is the result of societies shaped by stigmas. Stigmas are social and cultural factors that shape how we address and respond to mental health as individuals, communities, and institutions.

TOGETHER WE CAN unpack the vast layers of concealment cultures impact on all of us!

What are the highest risk factors for mental health crises?

The Concealment Gap

The highest risk factor for mental health crises is untreated and undertreated mental health challenges.

Being harmed from mental health challenges is not an inevitability. Mental health challenges, like any other underserved medical condition, can develop and worsen over time.

The culture of concealment enforces a critical gap between the initial onset of symptoms from diagnosable illnesses and psychological injuries (trauma) and the point of crisis which can be days/weeks/months/years in escalation.

This gap between onset and crisis is often experienced in a silence, where the individual conceals, minimizes, and navigates, avoiding identification of their mental health challenges.

Concealment culture reinforces the biggest obstacles to timely and effective support.

TOGETHER WE CAN close the gap between the onset of symptoms and intervention with treatment and support.

What does ENGAGEMENT & EDUCATION & ACTIVATE mean? Why is any of it 'innovative"?

Voices of Experience

We are innovating programming by empowering the lived experience to take agency and lead our work. This modality expands activities into shaping our outreach, education, and activism practices, beyond that of just advocates or mouthpieces.

ENGAGEMENT: To rally our coalition, we must perform outreach and engage people in their organic mental health intersections. This means sharing the Proactive Vision within their space and not tokenizing or constricting the message within artificially isolated demographic compartments.

We are committed to building platforms to authentically engage the vast spectrum of intersections mental health care touches.

Using digital social media tools like Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, and other accessible opportunities, we create agile and versatile content to connect with the diverse range of spaces that need to be a part of this conversation.

EDUCATION: Building proactive environments requires progressively tiered education. We need to educate and train individuals in three phases:

1. We must learn how the culture of concealment creates our current obstacles.

2. We must learn how our mental health functions and understand psychological injuries (trauma) and diagnosable illnesses.

3. We must educate on how to recognize early signs and symptoms of illness and injury (trauma).

ACTIVATE: We will train individuals to become activist ALLIES empowering them to facilitate and embed proactive practices in their community spaces and institutional policies.

TOGETHER WE CAN be the grassroots coalition that leads to an irreversible momentum in our communities!

What do you mean by the revolutionary coalition?

Allies of Hope

The Hope For Us Network and our Allies comprise a revolutionary coalition because we shatter the paradigms reinforced by concealment culture.

Concealment culture compels mental health protocols to compartmentalize itself into bifurcated programming silos. This separates populations mutually passionate and impacted by mental health to operate separately from one another.

To do this, we are building platforms to empower citizens, clinicians, policymakers, and organizations to join us in-network for change bringing the proactive mindset to their audiences and spaces.

Our goal is not to replace or overshadow other mental health groups but to uplift and maximize their impact by joining us in the path forward on transforming mental health care in all of our communities.

Because ONLY TOGETHER WE CAN!