The Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services would like to remind residents of the resources available for residents who are feeling increased mental health crises and substance use due to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns. “It’s important that the community knows that Behavioral Health services are available,” DHHS Behavioral Health Substance Use Disorder […]
Mental health
Posted inNews
Mental Health ‘Tsunami’ Looms: Can California Prevent a Surge in Suicides?
Celinda Gonzales has a long list of worries: She worries about COVID-19, which recently spiked near the Yurok reservation where she lives in Humboldt County. She worries about the wildfires threatening her remote, forested town, Weitchpec. She worries about gill rot and algae blooms in the Klamath and Trinity rivers, which join together just over […]
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NCJ Preview: Grand Jury Reports, Powers Creek Produce and Flocking Up
The Grand Jury reports are in — what does that mean? We’re talking with Access Humboldt about how this team of volunteers acts as a kind of watchdog over everything in our county from criminal investigations to mental health care. And if you’ve ever thought about getting into the small-scale produce racket or raising your […]
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News Roundup: LoCo Reports Whistleblowers at FedEx and T-S Looks at Mental Health Services in Age of COVID
The Lost Coast Outpost is reporting that whistleblowers are calling out what they deem unsafe conditions in local FedEx operations that could spread the COVID-19 virus to customers and employees. The employees tell the Outpost‘s Ryan Burns that they don’t believe proper precautions are being taken in the local warehouse and they haven’t been given […]
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‘You May be the World’
We are living in uncertain times and with uncertainty can come anxiety, which can affect the way we interact with and parent young children. Consider how your child or the young children in your life will look back at this moment in time five years from now. Will they remember long walks and snuggling with […]
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Into an Unknown Wilderness
This morning, like many of you reading this, I woke hoping it had passed. That we could proceed with our lives as we lived them prior to COVID-19. But alas, we are living this new reality of “social distancing” and “shelter-in-place.” Cable news networks are committed to ongoing analysis and release of information, and social […]
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Coping with COVID-19
The novel coronavirus has had a sudden and dramatic impact on our public and private lives, and we are entering a period of real uncertainty about what the future holds. The statewide shelter-in-place order we’ve been given is unprecedented but it is a necessary response to an emergency situation. Still, it can be disorienting to […]
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The Jury’s In
By their very nature, Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury reports generally make for pretty dry reading. Not only are they products of deep-dive investigations into the inner workings of the bureaucracies of government, but they are also the work product of 19 citizens who must be in agreement not just about what an investigation found […]
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Digital Nomad: A Bipolar Man’s Slow Slide into Homelessness in Humboldt
With his head hung low and a purple, black eye cast to the ground, Robert Stretton crossed the street outside the Humboldt County Courthouse on the cold, rainy afternoon of Dec. 20. He had just been served with a restraining order, a day after being evicted from an office on Eureka’s E Street that he’d […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Facing the Cost of California’s Mental Health Crisis
Working in Old Town Eureka, we see California’s mental health crisis play out daily: the unshaven man draped in a wet blanket, standing on a street corner talking to himself; the woman with disheveled hair pulling a rolling suitcase and screaming a guttural cry so blood-curdling you’d swear she was being stabbed to death; the […]
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County Announces $7.5 Million Grant for School Mental Health Services
The Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services announced today that $7.5 million in grant funding will pour into the county over the next four years to provide additional mental health services in local schools. Coupled with two additional grants, that means more than $9 million in mental health funding will be coming to […]
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Jail Adds Suicide Netting to Budget
The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors will discuss tomorrow whether to add a provision for suicide netting to the Humboldt County jail’s budget. The item comes after a rash of suicide attempts — 12 in 2015 — in the facility, one of which proved fatal. Two of the 12 attempts involved inmates jumping from the […]