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Additional Mental Health Resources

Additional Mental Health Resources

ACMH’s Mission: To ensure All Michigan children and youth with emotional, behavioral, or mental health challenges and their families live in a safe, welcoming community with access to needed services and supports.

Who we are: Family ~ almost all of ACMH’s staff are family members who themselves have navigated the mental health and other family service systems for their own children with mental health challenges.

The Premier Voice of Advocacy for children and youth with mental health challenges and their families in Michigan!  ACMH is:

  • MI’s Chapter of the National Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health.
  • MI’s Federally funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA) to serve as the Statewide Family Network for Michigan.
  • The training & Coordinating Partner for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Service’s Parent Support Partner and Youth Peer Support Projects.
  • A statewide and community partner to child and family serving systems; working to improve services and supports to the families we serve and to ensure that family voice continues to be key in systems change efforts.

For additional information, go to the Association for Children’s Mental Health.

  • Mental Health and Juvenile Justice

The “Blueprint for Change: A Comprehensive Model for the Identification and Treatment of Youth with Mental Health Needs in Contact with the Juvenile Justice System” (K. Skowyra and J. Cocozza, National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Policy Research Associates, Inc.) estimates that “as many as 70 percent of youth in the (juvenile justice) system are affected with a mental health disorder, and one in five suffer from a mental illness so severe as to impair their ability as a young person and grown into a  responsible adult”.

The Bureau is committed to helping youth and families across systems, including those children and youth with serious emotional disturbance who may come to the attention of the juvenile justice system. A variety of collaborative projects through the Mental Health Block Grant have been funded, designed to positively impact juvenile justice involved youth and their families. Some of the previously Mental Health Block grant funded projects include Multi-Systemic Therapy, Brief Strategic Family Therapy, Wraparound services specifically for Court supervised populations/ programming, statewide training related to mental health screening, and Community Mental Health clinicians working directly within the Juvenile Court to provide screening, assessments, and/or consultations for court involved youth. 

In 2017 the former Division of Mental Health Services to Children and Families utilized Mental Health Block grant funding to launch the “Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Screening Initiative”, which is designed to provide age appropriate screening and service linkage to children, youth, and families that are newly introduced to the juvenile justice system (pre-adjudication) and those at-risk of becoming involved in the juvenile justice system in an effort to promote diversion from formal court involvement whenever possible.  The Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Screening Initiative is funded through Mental Health Block grant funding, which allows the services to be provided at no cost to the child and family.  In 2019 additional Mental Health Block grant funding was allocated to expand the project into additional Michigan communities. The Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Initiative project sites work directly with their local system partners (i.e. schools, ISDs, courts, law enforcement, etc.) to implement the project in a way that will best meet the unique needs of their community/catchment area.      

Information on the Mental Health Diversion Council and Juvenile Justice Subcommittee.