This Mental Health Awareness Month, the United States continues to grapple with a mental health care crisis. While the term crisis may be an accurate description, defining the nation’s problem of insufficient mental health care access is much more complex, involving an array of factors such as workforce, payments, coverage, and stigma. To solve this crisis, it is essential to determine targeted policy solutions for each of these factors—and identify who must implement them.
The institute previously highlighted the challenges to mental health care across the country in the issue brief, Exploring Barriers to Mental Health Care in the U.S. The brief emphasized policy solutions such as integrating and coordinating primary care and mental health care providers, expanding insurance coverage for patients, and enforcing state and national parity laws. Additionally, the institute noted the supply and distribution across varying mental health professions in the data snapshot, Who’s Your Therapist? Examining the Behavioral Health Workforce. The snapshot emphasized policy opportunities to utilize the increasing supply of nondoctoral level professionals within integrated care teams, including task shifting and training across provider types.
Moreover, the institute’s Executive Director, Atul Grover, MD, PhD, engaged in policy dialogues on integrated behavioral health care with the Bipartisan Policy Center, including contributing to a series of expert roundtables as well as a corresponding public panel discussion on policy solutions to deliver behavioral health integration.
While Mental Health Awareness month comes to an end, the institute's focus on addressing the mental health care crisis will continue.
If you have insights, the institute would love to hear them—especially those that can shed light on the challenges of workforce and payment parity and how they interact.