Middletown, Conn., October 14, 2026– Community Health Center, Inc. (CHC), in partnership with the Weitzman Institute (WI) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) are proud awardees of $2 million in funding for five years from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for CHC’s proposal on “Implementing Zero Suicide in a Large Federally Qualified Health Center.” This grant will assist in creating a Zero Suicide Framework across the state of Connecticut.
Suicide is a growing crisis in Connecticut, predominantly burdening low-income, medically underserved patients, CHC’s core constituency. In 2025 alone, 1 in 10 adult CHC patients reported having suicidal thoughts, highlighting the urgent need for improved healthcare addressing suicide.
Over the next five years, this system-wide project will transform how we identify, engage, treat, and support patients experiencing suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Zero Suicide is more than a single program or intervention. It is a framework based on the belief that suicide can be eliminated by improving service access and quality and through practicing continuous quality improvement. The framework builds suicide prevention into every level of care and creates systems that are better equipped to support patients throughout their care journey.
CHC is a Federally Qualified Health Center providing medical, dental, and mental health care to 150,000 patients at more than 200 locations in Connecticut and is part of America’s first health system dedicated to primary care delivery and innovation for under-resourced populations, the Moses/Weitzman Health System. “Early in my career as a psychiatrist, nothing kept me up at night like a patient at risk of suicide,” says CHC’s Chief Psychiatry Officer, Tichianaa Armah, MD. “Sitting with someone who has lost all hope is among the hardest things medicine asks of us — and today, as a physician leader, I watch clinicians everywhere shoulder that same fear, often without the ground beneath them to do it well. But the opening is already there. In a single clinic visit, a patient is seen by a chain of people — the front desk, the medical assistant, the nurse, the primary care provider, the therapist, Psychiatrist or PMHNP — and any one of them can be the person who notices, and acts. Zero Suicide is how we make sure someone does. This grant lets us build that readiness into every hallway and every role, so that catching risk is no longer a matter of instinct, but of design.”