-
Building the Missing Middle: How Advocacy Helped Create a New Behavioral Health Intervention for New Yorkers With Serious Mental Illness
For decades, our behavioral health systems have faced the growing challenge of meeting the needs of people with serious mental illness (SMI). In New York, where the Institute for Community Living (ICL) operates, and most places in the country, demand for services far exceeds supply. Furthermore,...
-
Advocacy’s Strange Bedfellows: How New York’s Landmark Behavioral Health Budget Came to Be
Governor Hochul's Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2023-2024 (FY 2024) included unprecedented investments in behavioral healthcare and related services for the most vulnerable residents of New York. This emerged in response to widespread homelessness, rapidly rising rates of suicide, and epidemics...
-
When Opioid Narratives Become Policy
For more than a decade, US opioid policy has been guided by a compelling but incomplete story: aggressive pharmaceutical marketing and overprescribing by physicians flooded communities with addictive pills, igniting an epidemic of opioid use disorder (OUD) and death. This narrative drove sweeping...
-
New York Behavioral Health Advocates Rally at Capitol, Win Support of 100+ Legislators for Critical Funding Increase
The Mental Health Association in New York State and leading statewide behavioral health and human services organizations have been rallying with legislators at the State Capitol in support of the final budget for FY 2026-27 including a 4% targeted inflationary increase (formerly known as the cost...
