Our mental health is deeply connected to every element of our lives. It impacts our overall health, relationships, success in school and at work, our ability to care for ourselves and others, and to pursue our goals. Mental health is also protective, helping us cope with stress, life transitions, and difficult times. As Gwen, a young adult in New York City told CSSP, “mental health means much more than just the absence of mental health challenges, it’s about well-being, and a sense of community, connection, safety, and hope. Access to mental health support and a nurturing environment can be life-changing. It helps create a path toward stability and a chance for a fulfilling future.”
Why Mental Health Matters
Leading a healthy and fulfilling life requires a proactive approach to caring for our mental health. When parents are well, they are better able to meet their families’ daily needs, they feel less stress, and can care for their children, helping them to grow into healthy and happy adults. When young people are well, they have a solid foundation from which to build healthy lives, and pursue their education, career, and other goals they set for themselves.
Caring for our mental health and well-being means having the mental health services and supports that meet our needs, including a range of readily available, culturally responsive, and linguistically accessible therapies and approaches. It also means that families can access supports that meet their broader needs, such as child care, healthy foods, safe and stable housing, healthy environments, and opportunities for education and employment. These supports help to alleviate poverty and reduce financial strain and the associated stress of meeting basic needs. These supports also promote health and well-being for both parents and children, and have an important positive impact on both mental health and parenting. Yet all too often, young people and families are unable to access mental health services and the family supports that meet their broader needs.
Young people and families experience many barriers to well-being. For many, accessing mental health care is a key challenge for a range of reasons including high out-of-pocket costs for certain therapies or treatments, waitlists, and disruptions in care. Mental health supports that are available are often narrowly focused on treating acute symptoms and stabilizing crises, and typically rely heavily on diagnoses, rather than on promoting well-being. Often, mental health care is only accessible when there is an urgent need which can lead to delays in care until there is an emergency or crisis. Families also face barriers (including work requirements and benefit cliffs) in accessing public benefits that increase their stress and make it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get and maintain critical supports such as Medicaid, that promote their health and well-being.
In our conversations with young people and parents, they consistently voice their desire for a better landscape of supports that promote their well-being and ability to pursue the goals they set for themselves. Young people call for universal access to mental health services so that they can easily connect with providers without jumping through hoops, making tradeoffs like foregoing therapy in order to make rent or afford groceries, or worrying about the cost and what is or isn’t covered by their insurance. They describe wanting the choices they make to be respected, access to a range of services they identify as helpful, and care that is holistic, culturally responsive, and affirming of their identities and experiences.
Parents share a desire to be able to access mental health services when they need them, for as long as they need them. This includes support during the postpartum period when many parents face financial hardship and parental stress is at an all-time high. Juggling work, caregiving, and daily responsibilities, parents want public systems and programs to work better, with fewer administrative barriers, in particular, enrollment and recertification processes that often make it difficult for them to get and maintain benefits for which they are eligible. Parents report that these administrative burdens associated with public benefits add to the stress they already feel trying to make ends meet and exacerbate mental health challenges.
The Opportunity Ahead
Recent reports on youth mental health and parental stress by the Surgeon General bring needed attention to the mental health challenges we are facing, and elevate well-being as a public health priority. As we look toward 2025, we have an important opportunity to protect and promote health and wellbeing for young people and families, especially those who face direct threats to their health and lives, including immigrant, LGBTQIA+, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous children, youth, and families.
We can meaningfully support young people and families by advancing policies that ensure they have access to a range of mental health supports that promote well-being and healing in holistic ways, are responsive to their identities and experiences, and available well-before any crises arise. Policies should promote access to mental health supports in places where young people and families spend time and at times that are convenient and ensure that cost is never a barrier to care. Given what we know about the importance of foundational supports for well-being, we must also protect programs like Medicaid and others that help to reduce stress and ensure families have what they need to lead healthy lives. We should at the same time, push to expand program eligibility, increase access, and bolster benefit levels for these essential programs, laying the groundwork for reforms to existing supports to meet families’ needs over the long term.
It is our collective responsibility to support young people and families, and policy is an essential tool for doing that. Working in partnership with young people and families, we can advance policies that value people’s health and wellbeing and make it possible for all families to lead happy and healthy lives.