In the News
By the beginning of the following school year, the Palo Alto Unified School District had implemented a new policy: It put suicide prevention contact information on student IDs.
Innovative mental health centers in eight states will lose enhanced federal funding on Sunday for a Medicaid demonstration that enables them to offer a broad array of coordinated services for people with serious mental illness and substance use disorders.
The two-year, $1 billion certified community behavioral health clinic program (CCBHC), which enjoys bipartisan support, will end unless Congress quickly agrees to at least temporarily extend the funding.
Martha is an 18-year-old Latina college student from La Puente. She studies part-time and works part-time to support herself and her family. As the first in her family to attend college, she is a great source of pride for her loved ones. Yet, had a concerned friend not asked Martha if she was OK, we could be telling a very different story.
Watson Coleman is teaming up with celebrities and mental health advocates like actress Taraji P. Henson, who reached out to her and appeared before Capitol Hill lawmakers this month to discuss suicide among black children and recount her own struggles with mental health.
The new nonpartisan group, called Mental Health for US, aims to push candidates in both parties to be more vocal about their policy ideas to improve mental health care — particularly as the 2020 election increasingly centers on health care issues like expanding Medicare or lowering the price of prescription drugs. It's the product of a collaboration between some of the nation's most prominent mental health groups, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Jed Foundation.
The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act required large group health plans that provide benefits for mental health to put that coverage on an equal footing with physical health. Two years later, the Affordable Care Act required small-group and individual health plans sold on the insurance marketplaces to cover mental health services and do that at levels comparable with medical services. (In 2016, parity rules were applied to Medicaid managed-care plans, which cover the majority of people in that federal-state health program for low-income residents.)
In a nation where suicide continues to climb, claiming more than 47,000 lives in 2017, such deaths among older adults — including the 2.2 million who live in long-term care settings — are often overlooked.
For years now, the county has been proposing to replace the facility. In June 2018 county supervisors finally approved $2.2 billion to build a replacement with the notable amendment that the new facility would be designed with a focus on mental health and rehabilitation. As reported by The Los Angeles Times at the time, 70 percent of the county jail's population were physically or mentally ill.
Homeless patients made about 100,000 visits to California hospitals in 2017, marking a 28% rise from two years earlier, according to the most recent state discharge data.
More than a third of those visits involved a diagnosis of mental illness, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. By contrast, 6% of all hospital discharges in California during that time involved a mental health diagnosis.
After more than 2,000 Missouri children diagnosed with mental illness were shifted from traditional Medicaid into three for-profit managed-care companies, the state's hospitals noticed an alarming trend: a doubling in the percentage who had thoughts of suicide or attempted suicide.