Below is a summary of recent developments and compelling news stories from across the country highlighting America's broken mental health treatment system and how to fix it.
Treatment Advocacy Center in the News
Executive Director Lisa Dailey was quoted in a New York Times article about the efforts to rename 'schizophrenia,' saying that developing better medication for schizophrenia spectrum disorders is the best way to destigmatize schizophrenia. Read more here.
Policy Director Brian Stettin published an op-ed in the New York Daily News urging New York City Mayor Eric Adams to improve the implementation of Kendra's Law and to rethink New York City's entire mental health system in order to treat the most vulnerable. Read more here.
Legislative and Policy Counsel Michael Gray published an op-ed in The Hill urging states to pursue waivers from the IMD exclusion and Congress to fully repeal the discriminatory law. Read more here.
Speaker's Bureau
Policy Director Brian Stettin spoke to the Kentucky House Health & Family Services Committee on Jan. 13 about how Kentucky could change its assisted outpatient treatment law in order to treat its most vulnerable citizens. His remarks start at 23:22. Watch the full testimony here.
A few days later, the measure was passed out of the same committee. We're one step closer to ensuring Kentuckians with severe mental illness will be able to access life-saving treatment. Read more about it here.
RESEARCH WEEKLY: January 2022 Recap
Over 50% of people with both serious mental illness and another disability did not receive outpatient treatment
People with disabilities are often confronted with many barriers to accessing both physical and mental health treatment. This is especially pertinent to serious mental illness treatment because serious mental illness is much more prevalent among people with a disability compared to people without a disability.A new paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that one third of individuals with both serious mental illness and another disability did not receive prescription medications and more than half did not receive outpatient treatment within the past year. This finding emphasizes the inadequate access to mental health services for people with a co-occurring disability and serious mental illness.
