We Should Keep Talking about Mental Health, and Strengthening Connections to Care

In the spring of 2021, after a year of lockdowns and seismic changes to everyday life due to COVID, a staggering 32.8% of U.S. adults reported experiencing symptoms of depression. That’s a threefold increase from pre-pandemic levels.

And while the number of people struggling with their mental health increased during the pandemic, access to appropriate care did not. On #WorldMentalHealthDay, I’d like to share some of our work from The Pew Charitable Trusts on why improving responses to behavioral health emergencies is more important than ever.

In a recent episode of Pew’s podcast, “After the Fact,” NPR 's Rhitu Chatterjee and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 's   Catherine Ettman, PhD discuss how the pandemic revealed existing structural flaws in America’s #mentalhealth care system, which were only aggravated with the influx of people seeking care.

Unfortunately, many people experiencing a mental health crisis are met by police and placed in overcrowded emergency rooms or jails, ill-equipped to treat their needs and even likely to exacerbate certain mental health disorders. More than 2 million people with mental illness are arrested each year, usually for misdemeanors or other low-level crimes. What’s more – people of color make up a disproportionate percentage of those in the criminal justice system, but are less likely to be identified for signs of potential mental illness and to receive treatment once incarcerated.

So, how can we better connect people to the care they need?

Communities across the country have experimented with new health-first approaches that create alternatives to police-only responses and have seen promising signs of success. For example, Dallas introduced the Multi-Disciplinary Response Teams (MDRT) model in 2018, bringing together mental health professionals, paramedics, and specialized law enforcement officers. With these teams, only 2% of responses resulted in arrests for new offenses, and mental health-related emergency admissions dropped by 20%.

The transition of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to #988 – the new national mental health, substance use, and suicide hotline implemented in July – marked the beginning of a nationwide effort to strengthen the country’s crisis infrastructure. The three-digit dialing code aims to improve how the country responds to mental health emergencies by providing a health-first approach and diverting crisis calls away from police and toward mental health clinicians. This is a historic opportunity for states and local leaders to also ensure that 988 operates in coordination with another emergency hotline – 911 – so that leaders can expand the continuum of care available in their communities and the person in distress receives an appropriate response.

While there is much work left to be done, I’m hopeful about the strides we’ve made so far and the conversations we’re having this #WorldMentalHealthDay2022.