Cereal for Dinner, a Rhode Island nonprofit for people with serious depressed mood and other mental health challenges, is partnering with Newport Mental Health’s mobile emergency response team, known as RI Outreach (RIO).
“We at Cereal for Dinner are committed to providing folks with free, accessible resources and information they need to live day-to-day with significant mental health challenges, outside of the clinical space.” said Cereal for Dinner Founder and Executive Director Emily Derecktor. “Part of life, especially with people impacted by mental health issues, is experiencing intermittent episodes of high emotions, which are hard to deal with in the heat of the moment,”.
Derecktor, with consultation from a team of psychiatrists, licensed therapists, and peers with lived experience, has developed and is distributing pocket-sized Care Kits with items that support distress tolerance skills, and are grounded in dialectical behavior therapy.
The portable Care Kits will be used by RIO team members to offer to clients experiencing highly painful emotions.
“The partnership will be an impactful and important innovation among suicide prevention efforts within the state, by not only having behavioral health clinicians instead of police responding to behavioral health emergency calls, but also equipping clients with a portable set of tools to use in the event of future episodes of overwhelming stress,” said Newport Mental Health President Jamie Lehane.
Both RIO and Cereal for Dinner aim to meet people where they are in their mental health journeys. That often entails an out-of-office approach toward supporting people in mental health crises.
RIO Director Partaja “PJ” Spann notes that the RIO team, consisting of behavioral health and medical professionals, will respond to emergency calls for people experiencing mental health crises, rather than the police. RIO seeks to support people experiencing high stress and anxiety by combining de-escalation techniques and emotional support in addition to connecting them with social support services, care items, and eventually with psychological support.
Similarly, Cereal for Dinner “meets you where you are” by providing the first comprehensive digital guide to living life with significant depression and mental health challenges, with resources such as a directory of low-effort, affordable recipes, how to afford care, and more. She plans on developing additional supportive coping tools in the future, along with starting in-person and online groups to support community, engagement in enjoyable activities, and taking care of challenging everyday life tasks.
“We are so thrilled to be providing these Care Kits, which provide an accessible and effective solution to folks in desperate need of alternative ways of tolerating challenging emotional experiences, at the time they are experiencing them,” Derecktor said.
If you or a loved one needs help, call Newport Mental Health at 401-846-1213 or the Behavioral Health Helpline 988 and an RIO team will be dispatched to meet you wherever you are.
