In early 2020, as COVID began to spread across the United States, the leaders of the nation’s 14 leading mental health, addiction and well-being advocacy groups and professional organizations began meeting weekly to generate proposals for how to powerfully address the new wave of need. With our combined expertise working on the fault lines of substance use, suicide and severe mental illness towards well-being and resilience, we created a Unified Vision for Transforming Mental Health and Substance Use Care, that offers actionable pathways for success. And, for the first time, there is strong agreement among stakeholders about what must be done.
Read Unified Vision Here
The news was announced in a joint press release from all 14 organizations. Read the release.
“Over decades, America’s mental health care system has been chronically underfunded and broken such that people with serious mental illness were more likely to be living on the streets, languishing in jails, or dying two decades prematurely in poverty rather than receiving compassionate treatment. And all that was before COVID-19 arrived. Just as our anemic public healthcare system left us unprepared for the pandemic, we were even less prepared for an unprecedented mental health crisis afflicting half of all Americans… The good news is that there is a plan – a roadmap for the new administration, Congress and state governments to reinvent our broken mental health care infrastructure.” — Read more in a new op-ed in The Star-Ledger.
Convenors: Daniel Gillison, CEO, National Alliance on Mental Illness, and Tyler Norris, CEO, Well Being Trust
Founding Members (CEO):
- American Psychiatric Association, CEO & Medical Director, Saul Levin, MD, MPA, FRCP-E
- American Psychological Association, CEO and Exec. Vice President, Arthur C. Evans, Jr., PhD
- Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, President and CEO, Danna Mauch, PhD
- Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, President and CEO, Andy Keller, PhD
- Mental Health America, President and CEO, Paul Gionfriddo
- National Association for Behavioral Healthcare, President and CEO, Shawn Coughlin
- National Alliance on Mental Illness, CEO, Daniel H. Gillison, Jr.
- National Council for Mental Wellbeing, President and CEO, Charles Ingoglia, MSW
- OneMind, Chairman, Garen Staglin; President, Brandon Staglin
- Peg’s Foundation, President, Rick Kellar, M.B.A.
- Steinberg Institute, Chair, Thomas Insel, M.D. (former director NIMH until 2015)
- The Kennedy Forum, Former U.S. Rep. (D-RI) and Founder, Kennedy Forum, Patrick J. Kennedy
- Treatment Advocacy Center, Executive Director, John Snook
- Well Being Trust, Chief Executive, Tyler Norris, MDiv
Join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #unifiedvision.
