Children’s Mental Health Community Speakout
Pre-registration is Now Open for the Healthy Minds, Healthy Kids Community Speakout
Join us Tuesday, October 8 from 6:30-7:30pm, for this important virtual event and learn more about mental and behavioral health advocacy, HMHK’s priorities, and what community members can do to help the cause.
In New York, our health system doesn’t have the capacity to treat the skyrocketing number of young people desperately in need of mental health support. Right now, children and youth have to get really sick to get help, and that help is too often delivered in emergency rooms and hospitals, rather than through the ongoing, high quality services they need to stay healthy. Providing quality care to children – particularly those with complex needs – requires close collaboration between parents and physicians, care coordinators and social workers, therapists and insurers, and so many others.
During Our Event You Will:
- Learn About the mental health crisis impacting children, youth, and families
- Meet the Healthy Minds, Healthy Kids campaign organizers, youth and parents like you who are leading this movement
- Advocate With Us on policies that will address our mental health crisis
- Take Action by contacting your state leaders
Join our movement as champions fighting to ensure youth and families receive the critical support they need to end our mental health crisis and make a future where children and families can grow and thrive.
Speakers & Event Details Forthcoming
Why This Matters
For nearly six years our campaign has championed and advocated for the needs of New York’s children, youth and families amid decades of chronic disinvestment in the children’s behavioral health system.
Our coalition must foreground the reality facing tens of thousands of families every day in our state: finding timely mental health supports for children and adolescents is overwhelming, isolating, exhausting, and often impossible.
Too many children in New York are facing unmet needs for mental health services. Half of youth with major depressive episodes in the past year did not receive treatment, and death by suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth age 15-19 in our state. This crisis was further exacerbated by the many economic and social harms heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Frighteningly, families throughout the state are facing waitlists in the hundreds or more, forced to wait months for services they desperately need today.
It is urgent that children, youth, and families are prioritized in this year’s State Budget to correct a long-standing crisis in part created from the lack of adequate investments in our mental and behavioral health.