For the third year in a row, 100,000 Americans died of an overdose, the Center For Disease Control (CDC) announced in May. Fifty million Americans struggle with mental health issues, including addiction. In fact, 45% of adults in their 30s and 40s report having a mental health diagnosis, up from 31% just five years ago. And sadly, we are seeing children as young as first grade attempt suicide.
May is Mental Health Awareness month, and there’s no greater time to call for a Mental Health Moonshot. By harnessing the collective will of the healthcare industry, researchers, the government, and startups, we can save countless lives and heal families, just as the nation did through highly effective Cancer Moonshots.
Here are four steps that will help us get there.
1. We need to expand access to care.
Only half of the people with mental health issues ever reach out for help, due to a shortage of options, stigma, and other barriers. Hackensack Meridian Health has opened new centers for inpatient care and outpatient care, reconfigured an entire hospital to create an 81-bed unit for patients battling mental illness and substance abuse and opened one of the first behavioral health urgent-care centers in the U.S. The innovative center has treated thousands of patients who avoided busy emergency departments while struggling with anxiety, depression, or other mental illness.
Next month, the network’s Carrier Clinic is scheduled to break ground on a 52-bed adolescent and pediatric inpatient unit, which is desperately needed. In more than 40 years in healthcare, I never thought I would see a growing need for inpatient psychiatric care for children as young as 7.
2. We need to be more resourceful in expanding the reach of our services to help more patients receive care faster.
Hackensack Meridian Health developed a telepsych hub that is available 24/7 in our emergency departments, so patients have much quicker access to a psychiatrist. The network also launched a Bridging Clinic so that licensed clinical social workers can support patients between visits when they are vulnerable.
3. We need committed partners, whether in government or private enterprise, to achieve our goals.
Here are two notable examples: Hackensack Meridian partners with other health systems and the state to support the New Jersey Pediatric Psychiatry Collaborative. The program helps young patients access specialized care quickly. This hub covers all 21 counties and helps pediatricians contact a psychiatrist immediately. To date, more than 210,000 patients have been screened and 22,000 provided with an immediate consultation.
The network also partners with New Jersey to improve behavioral health outcomes for Medicaid and uninsured and underinsured patients. The program has been a staggering success: More than 10,000 patients were treated in 2020 and 2023. These patients were 72 % less likely to be readmitted to an emergency department within 30 days of treatment. The key is highly coordinated care with clinical and social service teams to create seamless support for vulnerable patients, including pregnant women and new mothers.
4. It is essential to innovate treatment.
We like to say that innovation is in our DNA, so the network created Bear’s Den, a panel of experts which vets companies and products offering breakthroughs to improve care delivery and outcomes. The network is partnering with Canary Speech which uses proprietary machine learning to detect digital biomarkers in the human voice to explain or predict outcomes. The goal is to provide clinical-grade screening to detect voice changes that could indicate mental health deterioration in real time.
So let’s come together to write a new chapter for behavioral healthcare. We have a template for success: In the 1970’s, President Nixon’s Cancer Moonshot reduced death rates by 30 percent in a generation. Today 18 million Americans live with cancer. We no longer speak in hushed tones of “The Big C.” We owe it to the 1 in 4 people struggling with behavioral health issues to take a quantum leap forward and launch next-generation care.
Robert C. Garrett is CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey’s largest health network with 18 hospitals, more than 500 treatment locations, and the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.