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The Policy Landscape of Overdose Prevention Centers and the Path Forward
Key Takeaways: Overdose Prevention Centers (OPCs) are harm reduction facilities that provide many addiction services including medical supervision for those using pre-obtained drugs OPCs have consistently shown that they dramatically reduce overdose mortality and the spread of communicable...
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What Looked Like Defiance Was Actually Grief: The Healing Power of Peer Support in Children’s Mental Health
Ten-year-old Marcus stopped talking after his father was incarcerated. At first, school staff assumed he was angry. Then they thought he was being oppositional. Over time, his silence became impossible to ignore. He stopped participating in class discussions. He isolated himself during lunch. He...
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Closing the Gap Between Care and Outcomes in Behavioral Health Policy
As behavioral health expands access and continues to trend toward more parity with physical health, the focus is moving from just counting how many people get care to asking whether that care is actually improving lives. How behavioral health organizations consistently and clearly answer that...
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Bridge to Home: Creating an Innovative Pathway From Psychiatric Inpatient Care to Permanent Housing and Longer-Term Wellbeing
For many New Yorkers living with serious mental illness, leaving the hospital does not mean they will find stability. Instead, discharge often marks the beginning of another unfortunate cycle — from psychiatric units to shelters, from shelters back to emergency rooms, and sometimes back to the...
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Progress Over Perfection—Why Behavioral Health Policy Momentum Must Translate Into Action Now
For too many people seeking behavioral health support, the first step toward care can feel like a dead end. A referral that leads nowhere. A waitlist that stretches for months. A new provider who asks them to recount their story again and again, each retelling reopening wounds at the very moment...
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Your Electronic Health Record Should Help You Deliver Suicide Care
Many frontline behavioral health teams are expected to deliver suicide-safer care inside systems that were not built to support it. Staff are asked to screen for suicide risk, complete additional assessment when needed, create or update safety plans, coordinate handoffs, complete follow-up, and...
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How Cities Can Follow Oklahoma City’s Example to Address Residents’ Mental Health Needs Through Coordinated Emergency Response
Over the past three years, Oklahoma City has reimagined its emergency response system to better meet residents' behavioral health needs. The results are already impressive: the city's new alternative response teams have kept thousands of people out of the emergency room and drastically reduced...
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Advocacy Through Data: Making the Case for Community Behavioral Health Under Value-Based Payment
Most behavioral health policy arguments still run on stories. A person who was in and out of the hospital for years, then found a community program, got stable, went back to work. The stories are true and they matter. But a recovery story does not hold up well in a budget hearing or a payer...
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Showing Up Matters: The Power of Relationship-Based Advocacy in Behavioral Health
Behavioral Health Advocates: Association for Community Living, Coalition of Medication-Assisted Treatment Providers and Advocates of New York State (COMPA), Families Together in New York State, InUnity Alliance, Mental Health Association in New York State, National Alliance on Mental Illness New...
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We Don’t Need More Youth Mental Health Crisis Narratives – We Need to Create Affirming Spaces for Youth to Talk About Their Bodies
These are not kids in crisis. This observation grew increasingly certain as the conversation lingered, and so did the feeling that the conversation would remain painfully unfinished. After we wrapped up our workshop titled Resisting (dis)order and Reclaiming Neuroqueer Body Trust, some of the...
