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This coalition in San Antonio has built a crisis center for psychiatric and substance abuse emergencies and a 22-acre campus for the homeless that resembles a community college. To date, more than 100,000 people have been diverted from jail and emergency rooms to treatment, local officials say, resulting in a savings of nearly $100 million over an eight-year period. Thousands of emergency responders in San Antonio and Bexar County have been trained to manage mental health crises. (Helman, Cramer, Russell, Rezendes and Wallack, 12/11)

Any pet owner will tell you that their animal companions comfort and sustain them when life gets rough. This may be especially true for people with serious mental illness, a study finds. When people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were asked who or what helped them manage the condition, many said it was pets that helped the most. "When I'm feeling really low they are wonderful because they won't leave my side for two days," one study participant with two dogs and two cats, "They just stay with me until I am ready to come out of it." (Ross, 12/9)

You don’t need fancy genome-sequencing or brain-imaging equipment to know that some of the people we know and love are just a little, well, out there. We used to call these people “worriers,” “creative types,” “eccentrics” or “loners.” Like the rest of us, they seem to have come into the world with some recognizably fixed personality settings: They’re friendly or moody or dreamy or disorganized. They’re just more extremely so. (Healy, 12/9)

Workers in state hospitals and their union say the incident is only the most recent illustration of the dangers state employees face in Maryland health facilities. They say that many of the facilities are chronically understaffed and that staff members are ill-equipped and inadequately trained to deal with an increasingly dangerous population. The state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which operates Springfield and other state psychiatric facilities, says 90 percent of patients in its facilities are referred by the criminal justice system, up from 38 percent 15 years ago. (Dresser, 12/10)