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2025 Behavioral Health Trends Recap – Progress, Setbacks, and the Road to 2026
In early 2025, I called out 10 major trends shaping the behavioral health (BH) landscape: integration of behavioral and physical health, mental health parity, digital health and AI, federal policy shifts, prevention, vulnerable populations, workforce development, and overdose prevention. At...
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The Behavioral Health Workforce Crisis and its Impact on Families
The behavioral health field has been enduring a workforce shortage for some time. In 2021 alone, direct support organizations saw a turnover rate of 43%. On top of that, research has shown an increase in the demand for behavioral and mental health services since the beginning of the COVID-19...
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Telehealth, Burnout, and the New Normal
No amount of education, training, or clinical experience could have prepared us, as therapists, for the reality of collective trauma on a global scale. As clinicians at the largest provider of community-based outpatient mental health services for our county, Westchester Jewish Community Services...
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When Staff Burnout Prevents Progress
After nearly two years of facing COVID-19 waves and realities, healthcare workers are facing unprecedented levels of burnout. Providing important support, resources and space for staff can help prevent this and other acute stress responses from turning into longer term behavioral health...
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Staffing Shortages Halt Progress
This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on a particular topic. The author is served by Services for the UnderServed (S:US), a New York City-based nonprofit that is committed to giving every New...
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Weathering the Workforce Storm
Over the past year, the behavioral health and health field has endured a wave of voluntary employee departures and mounting challenges in its ability to recruit highly qualified staff. Turnover brings considerable costs to organizations, time - and resource-wise - in recruiting and training new...
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New York State Office of Mental Health Enhances Recruitment Efforts to Address Workforce Shortages
As New York State faces another wave of COVID-19, the need for access to mental health care in our communities has never been more urgent. Unfortunately, healthcare delivery systems across the nation are overwhelmed and understaffed. And while this workforce shortage presents many challenges, it...
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Federal and State Vaccine Mandates and The Behavioral Health Workforce
The COVID-19 public health emergency has contributed to workforce crises across almost all industries, fields and professions. The behavioral health field has not been immune. Even worse, behavioral health has historically been impacted by workforce challenges, stemming from “chronic underfunding...
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Let’s Celebrate Our Workforce
Every day when he left home to serve as the attending psychiatrist at an inpatient unit at a general hospital, he wondered whether he would contract COVID at work that day and bring it home to his wife and two small children. Maybe he had already brought it home. Had stripping in the garage and...
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From Crisis to Connection: Meeting the Workforce Shortage Head On
The workforce shortage has been felt keenly in the behavioral health field (BHECON, 2018). To effectively address this shortage, we must identify its root causes, understand dynamics that result in staff resignation decisions and connect the perceived impact on business sustainability while...
