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Behavioral Health Transformation

Listening

Across the behavioral health field, interest is growing in ensuring that people with behavioral health conditions have a greater voice in the system. At the same time, a profound need exists to address structural racism in behavioral health care. It is well known that people of color who need care have significant access challenges. And the data show they are often more likely to be caught up in the criminal justice system as a result of their illnesses.

People with lived experience of the existing systems — and providers and administrators in those systems — have critical insights that are essential to finding solutions to policy and practice problems, improving care experiences and outcomes, and eventually to helping people recover and live with purpose. CHCF is helping to build a system that prioritizes engagement and self-determination by people with serious behavioral health conditions in order to codesign programmatic and policy solutions that lead to equitable care for all.

Listening to Black Californians with Mental Health Conditions

Behavioral Health, Health Equity

This publication offers key findings from the Listening to Black Californians study on the experiences of Black Californians with mental health conditions, who are one of the groups most likely to report being treated poorly by a health care provider because of their race or ethnicity.

A Call for Meaningful Change

Behavioral Health, Telehealth, Health Equity, Workforce

'Listening to Californians with Low Incomes' report sounds alarm on deteriorating mental health.

Patience, Commitment Help Journalists Capture Harsh Realities of Fentanyl Addiction

Behavioral Health

A conversation with San Francisco Chronicle reporter Trisha Thadani and photojournalist Stephen Lam about how they approached a project that dug deep below the surface of the city's overdose crisis.

Pandemic Highlights Vulnerability of California’s Latinx Community

Agustín Durán

Health Equity, Behavioral Health

While the pandemic has upended the lives, finances, and health of millions of Californians from all backgrounds, it has hit Latinx people the hardest.

Bridging the Divide Between Mental Health Care and Addiction Treatment

Katherine Haynes

Behavioral Health

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, a CHCF senior program officer shares the heartbreaking story of her son’s death from mental illness and substance use, the result of being caught between two siloed health care systems. Her desire to prevent future tragedies inspires her work promoting integrated care in California.

In Their Own Words: How Fragmented Care Harms People with Both Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorder

Susan Anthony, Rebecca Catterson, Suzanne Campanella

Behavioral Health, Homelessness & Health Care

CHCF commissioned interviews with 54 people enrolled in Medi-Cal who are dually diagnosed with mental illness and substance use disorder. The paper and accompanying videos highlight what is working — and not working — for them in the health care system.