Hillary Clinton released a lengthy proposal on overhauling the country's mental health system Monday, saying it is time for the United States to help millions of Americans address mental illness "without shame, stigma or barriers," according to a spokesperson.
The Democratic presidential candidate's campaign website lists a number of initiatives aimed at improving mental health care.
The first bullet point in the plan focuses on prioritizing early diagnosis among children and teens, citing a study that found that two-thirds of children with mental illness receive no treatment for their conditions. Local and state programs that focus on screening for mental illness among children in schools and elsewhere will get additional funding, says the plan.
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The candidate also proposes a federal suicide prevention initiative that will similarly focus on bolstering resources in schools to address teen depression.
The plan also includes a number of pledges to further encourage integration of the mental and physical health systems. Those include rewarding collaborative care models in Medicare and Medicaid as well as "enforcing" mental health parity in insurance, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that is "too often ignored or not enforced," according to Clinton.
Clinton's plan also reflects the awakening in recent years that the nation's ballooning prison population is largely a result of untreated mental illness and that many who are languishing in prison are not getting the treatment necessary to be rehabilitated.
Unlike Bill Clinton, whose eight-year tenure was associated with a number of "tough on crime" measures that are now viewed by Democrats as counterproductive, the current Clinton campaign emphasizes treatment over punishment for low-level offenders, as well as training for police officers in responding to incidents involving mental illness. Many officer-involved shootings are the result of interactions with people suffering from mental illness.
The plan includes a few concrete spending promises, including $5 billion that Clinton pledges to invest to bolster a demonstration project aimed at getting comprehensive community health clinics in every state, $50 million on campus suicide prevention initiatives and $100 million for community-based housing for people with mental illnesses.
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