Our Health Policy Matters

 After 7+ years as President and CEO of Mental Health America, I retired on June 30, 2021. During that time, MHA accomplished a lot. It changed the ways we think about mental health and mental illness. We introduced our MHA screening program . It became the most successful early identification program ever, especially for children. Today, 10 million people have completed a free, anonymous screening with MHA and received targeted follow-up resources for their mental health. This number will grow by millions each year. We created our B4Stage4 messaging frame. Arguing that mental health conditions were the only chronic diseases that as a matter of public policy we waited until Stage 4 to treat, and then often inappropriately only through incarceration, we said we needed to act before Stage 4. Local, national, and international partners helped us advance this frame and change the way we approach and treat serious mental health conditions – because all mental health conditions sh

From time to time, I take a look at this blog - a collection of nearly 200 essays now aging in place - because I want to remind myself about how I thought about health policy broadly and the health and mental health policy issues that were hotly debated around the time the Affordable Care Act was being crafted and implemented. I think about how my own narrative and the narratives of my family members were affected by policy decisions made by others. There are plenty of commentators and scholars who know a whole lot more about this stuff than I ever did. So, most of my blogs have no historical significance at all - although one may someday.  It includes my first written expression of the "Before Stage 4" concept that became a hashtag (#B4Stage4) and the messaging frame for the work of Mental Health America beginning in 2014, a frame that was widely embraced by the mental health advocacy world. I posted only a handful of new blogs here while I was the position as President and