Greetings -

May kicks off Mental Health Awareness Month. There has never been such a time when Americans have struggled with their mental health. For example, the prolonged impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, where safeguards were put in place to keep people safe exacerbated the opioid epidemic resulting in over 107,000 individuals losing their lives to drug overdose in 2021. Rates of suicide increased for males and people of color as well during this period.

According to Mental Health America's latest findings, youth and adults alike are suffering from a range of mental health concerns as follows (quoted verbatim):

• In 2019-2020, 20.78% of adults were experiencing a mental illness. That is equivalent to over 50 million Americans.

• The vast majority of individuals with a substance use disorder in the U.S. are not receiving treatment. 15.35% of adults had a substance use disorder in the past year. Of them, 93.5% did not receive any form of treatment.

• 6.34% of youth in the U.S. reported a substance use disorder in the past year. That is equivalent to over 1.5 million youth in the U.S. who meet the criteria for an illicit drug or alcohol use disorder.

• Millions of adults in the U.S. experience serious thoughts of suicide, with the highest rate among multiracial individuals. The percentage of adults reporting serious thoughts of suicide is 4.84%, totaling over 12.1 million individuals. 11% of adults who identified with two or more races reported serious thoughts of suicide in 2020 – 6% higher than the average among all adults.

• Over 1 in 10, youth in the U.S. are experiencing depression that is severely impairing their ability to function at school or work, at home, with family, or in their social life. 16.39% of youth (age 12-17) report suffering from at least one major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year. 11.5% of youth (over 2.7 million youth) are experiencing severe major depression.

• Over half (54.7%) of adults with a mental illness do not receive treatment, totaling over 28 million individuals. Even in Montana (ranked #1), over 4 in 10 adults with a mental illness did not receive care.

• In the U.S., there are an estimated 350 individuals for every one mental health provider. However, these figures may actually be an overestimate of active mental health professionals, as it may include providers who are no longer practicing or accepting new patients.

What does this mean for our work at the Opioid Task Force? We need to:

• Double down on efforts that promote coordinated systems of care.
• Support the efforts of the newly launched Massachusetts Behavioral Health Centers.
• Strengthen and expand efforts like CONNECT and the Co-Responder Program where warm hand-offs to existing programs for individuals who have overdosed or are in crisis can get real-time support.
• Advocate for continued resources and incentives to increase the numbers of mental health clinicians for adults and children.

We hope you will join us in these efforts.

Sincerely,