The Treatment Advocacy Center’s focus is the holistic reform of our nation’s mental health system. Far too many families have suffered immeasurably as a result of outdated measures such as the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Diseases exclusion (IMD exclusion) and its associated bed shortages, in addition to misplaced incentives that force law enforcement onto the front lines of mental health care. Today’s event gave us the opportunity to have important conversations around these issues with policymakers at the highest levels of our government. We additionally discussed how quality, community-based initiatives like assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) federal grant programs are succeeding in many states across the country.
Additional highlights from the day also included:
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Dr Drew opened his remarks by acknowledging our founder Dr. Torrey and his books. He then gave a detailed explanation the history of our mental health care system and how it was broken from the beginning including a powerful call for changing commitment standards and ending the IMD Exclusion.
- Elinore McCance-Katz, MD highlighted the changes that she has been making at SAMHSA to prioritize severe mental illness, including the Administration's highly successful AOT grant program.
- Secretary Azar detailed a host of programs HHS is supporting to address severe mental illness and announced that the just-passed federal budget bill included $19M in new AOT funding!
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President Trump cited our report Going, Going, Gone when explaining the impact of the lack of hospital beds across the country.
We were proud to highlight our recommendations for critical severe mental illness reforms at today’s Summit and look forward to continuing our work with policymakers on each side of the aisle to ensure these issues remain a national priority.
