Mental Health Parity Newsroom Collaborative

The Mental Health Parity Newsroom Collaborative is a partnership between The Carter Center’s Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism, The Center for Public Integrity, and more than 20 news outlets in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia. More than 40 reporters and editors are working to produce stories on mental health care access, parity, and inequities in the U.S.  

©Shutterstock/GrAI

The numbers show that we’re in crisis...

in 5
U.S. Adults experience mental illness each year
million
More than half of U.S. adults with a mental illness don’t receive treatment—a number that has been on the rise since 2011.
in 10 people
who struggle with mental illnesses have no health insurance
%
of children experiencing major depression are not receiving care.

Though stigma still shrouds awareness of mental health issues, they are pervasive and have serious implications, putting people at high risk for suicide and crisis.

In The News

©Lisa Kurian Philip/WBEZ: Isabelle Dizon contacted her campus counseling center when she hit a low point during her sophomore year of college, but never heard back. Now a junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she hopes the school hires someone at the center to, at the very least, pick up the phone.

She called the number on her syllabus offering counseling. No one picked up.

©Navya Shukla/The Oglethorpe Echo: Katie Edwards, a counselor at Oglethorpe County Elementary School, helps third-grader Londyn Wilson with a work- sheet during a guidance lesson last month. The lessons are regularly held to guide students' empathy, emotion regulation, perseverance and more.

High need, low accessibility: Oglethorpe County residents face barriers to mental health care, even as teens and schools are willing to have the conversation

©Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian: Sickle cell patient Alexis Tappan, right, is checked out by Rana Cooper on at the Methodist Hospital Cancer Institute and Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. Memphis is home to one of the nation’s largest populations of adults living with sickle cell disease.

For many Black sickle cell patients, care must reach deeper

©Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian: April Ward-McGrory is a sickle cell patient, double amputee and advocate for those living with sickle cell disease.

Mental health issues complicate treatment for sickle cell patients