Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed state budget calls for bold and strategic investments in mental health care that would set the stage for large-scale transformation and launch California into a new era of service delivery.
Newsom’s budget proposal, released Thursday, highlights the debilitating impacts of untreated mental illness on families and communities throughout California. In response, it promises aggressive investment across the treatment spectrum, vastly expanding early detection and intervention in mental illness, and infusing significant new funding into housing and treatment for people whose mental illness is already progressed and disabling.
In addition, he signaled an end to what has been a longstanding leadership vacuum in the state’s approach to mental health care, saying that in the coming weeks he would establish a new “mental health czar” to drive California toward a more visionary approach to care.