Alabama Mental Health

May is mental health awareness month, and organizations across the United States use this time to educate Americans on how to both understand mental health issues and offer support to people who are struggling. We're joining those voices with our last Simplified episode of the month: an informative chat with Dr. Abby Horton, an Assistant Professor at The University of Alabama’s Capstone College of Nursing. Dr. Horton has over a decade of researching wellness and mental health on her resume, making her the perfect guest to answer questions from Lacey (and the listening audience!) about what goes on in our heads and how to best take care of them.

Fernando Clark spent the last 10 months of his life in a jail cell, waiting for psychiatric treatment a court ordered he undergo after he’d been arrested for stealing cigarettes and some fruit from a gas station. He died while waiting for the treatment that never arrived, found unresponsive in his jail cell.

Mobile leaders are working to better serve the community with technology and gamming at the helm. The city's Family Intervention Team (FIT) is working to build relationships with at-risk youth and their families— through a smartphone app.

Alabamians are being offered support and resources for mental health as winter moves in and days grow shorter, and the temperatures drop. Seasonal affective disorder symptoms start in the late fall or early winter and go away during the spring and summer.

October is Emotional Wellness Month. This is a great time to take stock of the stress in our lives, to figure out how that stress is affecting us, and to seek ways to not only lower our stress level, but to more effectively manage it.

A man who admitted to killing five people in 2016 has been executed by lethal injection in Alabama. Derrick Dearman was pronounced dead Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama.

Two former corrections officers in Alabama have agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges in the death of a mentally ill inmate. Court documents say the incarcerated man, Tony Mitchell, died of hypothermia and sepsis after being locked up at Walker County Jail in 2023.

More than a dozen states, including Alabama, and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against the social media platform TikTok, saying that the popular short-form video app is designed to be addictive to kids and harms their mental health.

Former corrections officer Joshua Conner Jones has pleaded guilty to criminal charges for his role in the death of a mentally ill incarcerated man in Alabama. The plea deal says Tony Mitchell died of hypothermia and sepsis after being incarcerated at Walker County Jail in 2023.

One Alabama community is working to keep medications and expired prescriptions out of the wrong hands. A Family Fun Day with a drug takeback event is planned on Saturday, April 27 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the parking lot of the Lee County Justice Center.