Today, Hillary unveiled her plan to support the millions of Americans living with mental health problems and illnesses. Hillary’s goal is for us to prioritize mental health as highly as physical health at all stages of life, treat mental health problems in a way that focuses on the whole person, and make it possible to seek mental health care without shame, stigma, or barriers. The plan is one of our most detailed yet, so here’s the gist:
- Nearly 60 million American adults and children cope with mental illness, many in isolation and without access to effective treatment or social safety nets. Hillary will build the medical and societal infrastructure to help these individuals not only cope, but thrive.
- Hillary will push for early diagnosis and early intervention for children and young adults and improvements in suicide prevention programs.
- She’ll also push for more collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to mental health care, as well as better training for providers.
- She’ll expand housing and job opportunities for those living with mental illness to help reduce institutionalization, isolation, and homelessness.
- She’ll fund more research into brain development and the science of mental illness, paving the way for better treatments in the future.
Let’s dive in. First, some figures:
- Over 40 million adults and an estimated 17 million children in our country cope with mental health issues.
- 14 million Americans live with a serious illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
- 20 percent of veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan are coping with mental health conditions.
- One in four college students is coping with a mental health condition as well.
This is a bona fide public health crisis. Americans are losing relationships, earnings (over $200 billion a year), and even their lives — suicides are at their highest level in years. But because of stigma, shame, and the wide dismissal of mental health problems as personal failings or even as “made up,” many cope alone. Hillary wants that to end — and to prioritize and treat mental health issues as diligently as we do physical health issues.
Here’s how she’ll do it:
Early diagnosis and intervention:
Per her lifelong emphasis on early childhood development, Hillary knows that prevention, early diagnosis, and early intervention in the lives of potential mental health patients are key. Most adults living with lifelong mental illness show signs of distress at an early age, but far too many aren’t recognized or treated, leading to increased likelihood of school dropouts and even suicide as young adults. Hillary will:
- Increase awareness and screenings for risk factors like maternal depression, infant mental health, and trauma and stress in childhood environments.
- Push to train pediatricians, teachers, school counselors, and others in the public health system to identify mental health problems at an early age, and scale up funding for state and local programs aimed at early detection and intervention.
- Fight for better funding for mental health services in universities, especially at under-resourced schools with more low-income students and students of color.
- Drive more federal resources to suicide prevention programs, with emphasis on high schools and colleges and the needs of LGBT students and students of color.
Rethinking mental health care models:
The demand for mental health care exceeds supply. Nearly 60 percent of adults with mental illness go untreated, and our jails house more people with mental illness than do our hospitals. Hillary believes a proper response needs to be more interdisciplinary, collaborative, and “whole person” focused for best results. She will:
- Enforce mental health parity to the full extent of the law, requiring that insurers covered by the parity statute provide mental health benefits that are equal to those for other medical conditions.
- Incentivize collaborative care approaches that place a patient under the joint care of a team rather than one overworked primary care provider or several segmented and siloed providers who can’t work together.
- Invest in high-quality community health centers equipped for mental health care.
- Promote the use of telehealth services and peer counselors.
- For low-level, nonviolent offenders with mental illness, prioritize community-based treatment over jail time, and train law enforcement in how to interact with individuals with mental health conditions in a proper and safe manner.
- Push to end our shortage of mental health professionals and make sure they are trained to care for patients of all cultural backgrounds.
Improving access to housing and the workforce:
Mental illness makes it tougher to function in the world, and mental health issues often intersect with other challenges, like drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness, and a broken criminal justice system. In addition, 80 percent of people with serious mental illness are not employed. Hillary supports a full range of housing options and employment support for individuals with mental health problems in order to help them lead independent and productive lives. She will:
- Work to fund housing that enables people with mental illnesses to live independently while paying no more than 30 percent of their adjusted monthly income in housing costs.
- Work with employers and mental health authorities to expand employment opportunities and best practices for retaining employees with mental health issues.
Hillary will also aid clinicians and providers by calling for more research on brain development and disorders, and she’ll hold a White House conference on mental health in her first year in office on how best to transform access, affordability, and quality of mental health care.
Hillary has detailed plans to help all Americans get the best possible mental health care —read more of that detail at “The Briefing!”