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Supporting Supervisors and Mid-Level Leaders in Behavioral Health Organizations
More than five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the nation, the behavioral health field continues to undergo profound and lasting shifts. Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization (2022) reported a global 25 percent increase in anxiety and depressive disorders, a surge that...
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Building the Future: Workforce Innovation in Behavioral Health for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities
As behavioral health needs among individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) become more complex and widespread, the workforce tasked with supporting them is under extraordinary pressure. To ensure quality, continuity, and person-centered care, behavioral health systems must invest in...
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Building Sanctuary: Creating Trauma-Informed Workplaces to Heal Burnout and Secondary Trauma in Behavioral Health
The quiet exhaustion in Sarah’s eyes told a story that statistics could never capture. After eight years as a behavioral health nurse, she found herself sitting in her car each morning, summoning the strength to walk through the clinic doors. Anxiety in her chest, her neck, and the very hands she...
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Addressing the Needs of the Perinatal Behavioral Health Workforce
The behavioral health care workforce, including mental health and substance use services, is facing mounting uncertainty at a critical moment. Under the recently passed, One Big Beautiful Bill Act [Congress.gov, 2025], federal loan restrictions will impose strict caps on the borrowing of future...
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Amplifying Peer Specialists in the Behavioral Health Continuum of Care
We have witnessed the ongoing strain on our traditional mental health care system over the past five years. There is a growing need for help across communities, where help seekers are experiencing nuanced mental health challenges. From suicidality, stress, bullying, substance misuse, to family...
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Strengthening the Backbone: Supporting Mid-Level Managers in Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations operate in environments marked by complexity, rapid policy shifts, and ongoing community needs. Services for the UnderServed (S:US) is one of New York City’s largest and most comprehensive human services agencies. S:US supports thousands of New Yorkers each year by...
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Building and Maintaining New York’s Behavioral Health Care Workforce
New York State has made tremendous investments in mental health treatment and services since 2022 and has made great progress addressing mental health needs in our State with a series of initiatives, such as expanding prevention and access, embracing innovative treatment methods, and increasing...
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When Workforce Strategy Becomes a Finance Problem
Every behavioral-health CEO I work with is watching the same crisis unfold. They need more clinicians than the market can supply, and even when they succeed in hiring, keeping those clinicians becomes a significant challenge. More than 122 million Americans live in areas where they might struggle...
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Keeping Clinicians in Private Practice: AI’s Role in Sustaining the Behavioral Health Workforce
The behavioral health workforce is under strain as demand for mental healthcare continues to accelerate. Over one third of the U.S. population lives in a Mental Health Professional Shortage Area as of 2024. Private practice clinicians are central to serving these communities, offering a low-cost...
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A Faltering Behavioral Health Workforce and a Prescription for Progress
The behavioral healthcare workforce is under considerable duress and ill equipped to meet a moment marked by unprecedented rates of mental illness, substance dependence, and other indices of human distress. By some measures, approximately half of mental health professionals report burnout because...
