BATON ROUGE — September is both National Suicide Prevention and Substance Abuse Month. Officials in Baton Rouge are taking action to attend to both.

One thing city and parish officials wanted to make clear. No matter where you live, whether you're rich or poor, what race you are or how old you are, both the opioid crisis and suicide can affect all of us.

Across East Baton Rouge, signs have been put up at several different locations. These signs show the 988 number, which is the suicide and crisis hotline.

It is being promoted by city and parish officials to provide immediate support for mental health and substance abuse crises, while 9-1-1- remains for emergencies.

One department leading the effort in suicide awareness and prevention is the parish coroner's office.

"We see on average somewhere between 40 and 60 suicides a year. Death by suicide. So we collaborate with the Baton Rouge Crisis Intervention Center and their lost team. It's essentially a team of individuals that are specifically trained to do something called postvention," EBR Coroner Dr. Beau Clark said.

Baton Rouge Police spoke about how dealing with mental health situations is becoming a core part of their training.

"We will send 10 additional officers to receive that assisted suicide intervention skills training course and what that's going to do is allow them to become trainers so that we'll have 10 employees in the Baton Rouge Police Department that can train all the other employees within the organization," Deputy Chief Sharon Douglas said.

As for the opioid crisis, East Baton Rouge has been fighting it for years. Dr. Clark sounded the alarm about the opioid crisis back in 2012.

"Right then and there I knew that this community was now embroiled in the opioid epidemic and of course the numbers since then have climbed and really started to climb precipitously over the course of the last four years as a result of fentanyl," Clark said.

According to the coroner's office, Baton Rouge has seen a vast improvement from their efforts. In the last year, the city saw a 32 percent decrease in fatal overdoses. Law enforcement also seized the largest amount of fentanyl in state history during a raid last month.

BRPD said they will have a drug takeback event at a later date for anyone wanting to get rid of any prescription drugs they no longer need. This would take away the ability of them being potentially abused.