On Purpose: 2022 Marks a Turning Point for Mental Health Advocacy

In many ways, this past year has been a turning point for mental health advocacy. For years, we struggled to get policymakers, educators, and the media to prioritize or recognize mental health as a critical health policy issue. That has all changed.

With a growing awareness of the devastating impact of the COVID pandemic on mental health, there is now a consensus that mental health must be valued, supported, and promoted across the lifespan. News stories and social media conversations focus almost daily on the impact of growing mental health needs, and legislators regularly reach out to MAMH to help identify solutions to service system gaps.

During this past year, MAMH took advantage of this new attention to mental health to help secure record funding increases and launch significant new programs across diverse mental health priorities. These successes were made possible due to close partnerships among funders, advocates, policymakers, mental health workforce leaders and, most important, people with mental health conditions and their families.

Our challenge for 2023 is to build on the momentum of the past year and think even bigger.

We’ve set our sights on providing mental health education to every K-12 student in the Commonwealth; breaking down barriers to true mental health parity; ensuring the success of the “Behavioral Health Help Line” to guide people in crisis through service systems; and implementing behavioral health urgent care across Massachusetts to help avoid crises in the first place.

MAMH is committed to ambitious goals. We look forward to working together, with you, to achieve real progress for people with mental health conditions and their families in the Commonwealth.