(Daily Hampshire Gazette- Maddie Fabien) In response to the youth mental health crisis, as many experts have called it, the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts has worked with over 25 organizations and many stakeholders on a regional roadmap designed to get youth the help they need.
The roadmap, which was presented at a well-attended UMass Amherst forum in November, focuses on the prevention of mental health conditions as well as the promotion of mental health wellness. Its authors also throw their support behind several pieces of legislation currently before the Legislature designed to address the crisis.
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“This pain is being felt universally throughout my district and beyond,” said state Sen. John Velis, co-chair of the Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use & Recovery.
“We need to have a very holistic approach to this; it needs to be school-based behavioral health, it needs to be increasing the number of beds that are out there for inpatient psychiatric beds,” Velis said. “But 90% of our kids are in the Massachusetts public schools, so [schools are] a good place for us to invest some significant resources.”
One bill before the committee would establish a child and adolescent behavioral health implementation coordinating council, which would create a three-year plan to establish a statewide school-based system.
Velis said the largest concern and area of opportunity in the bill is to “make sure that we’re not going in with a broad brush and saying… we know what is best for the entirety of kids in Massachusetts.”
“It needs to be very specific and individually-based based on the communities in question,” he said, adding that even between communities like Easthampton and Holyoke, which border one another, the needs of students differ.
Another proposed bill would allow schools to seek reimbursement for Medicaid-covered services, which would support school health programming and services.
The report also recommends a bill that would update the physical education mandate in grades K-12 to make mental health education a learning requirement in all public and private Massachusetts schools.
The bill does not mandate any specific curriculum, but rather aims to provide students with a holistic understanding of health that recognizes the relationship between physical and mental health.
“The research shows that early interventions work, so if we can get kids when they’re younger, the hope is that we might be able to get them the help that they need to prevent some of those downstream manifestations of these behavioral health concerns,” Velis said.