This May, we celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month by recognizing the vital role mental health plays in our well-being. As the United States faces an unprecedented mental health crisis, Mathematica is helping our partners strengthen the mental health service system and develop resilient communities by providing data-driven insights.
The work we do with our clients and partners generates new evidence and provides guidance on critical issues such as workforce strategies to expand access to mental health care, the impacts of the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic Demonstration, interventions to promote social and emotional learning in schools, and the high societal costs of untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Our recent work includes several key projects and the release of new findings:
- We are evaluating the California’s Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, which seeks to build a better behavioral health ecosystem for all California children, youth, and families—a system that is coordinated, youth centered, equitable, and focused on prevention. Mathematica will use culturally responsive and equitable evaluation practices and data equity that integrates diversity, equity, and inclusion into all phases of the evaluation and ensures the participation of people most affected by the initiative.
- We provided new insights into the implementation and impacts of Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics—organizations that receive enhanced payment rates from Medicaid to provide a broad array of mental health, substance use, and primary care monitoring services.
- We are helping develop a new linked data set on Medicaid beneficiaries who engage with emergency medical services, which will facilitate analysis to better understand the service use and outcomes of people who experience drug overdoses and other behavioral health emergencies.
- We took an in-depth look at strategies to promote the widespread adoption of crisis services and how those services are staffed.
- We released a new report that shows the high societal costs of untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders among birthing parents in Vermont.
“Communities across the country are struggling to ensure that children and adults have access to high-quality mental health services,” said Jonathan Brown, senior director of behavioral health at Mathematica. “We’re eager to provide our partners with the best evidence to develop effective and equitable policies and services that promote mental health and recovery.”
