Strategic Shift by Well Being Trust Creates Leadership Vacuum for Behavioral Healthcare Field

Many in the behavioral healthcare field were shocked to learn a week ago that the Well Being Trust no longer will serve as a national impact philanthropy focused on behavioral health. A message from CEO Tyler Norris and President Benjamin Miller detailed how Providence St. Joseph Health System has chosen to strategically pivot. Going forward, Well Being Trust efforts and resources will be focused only on clinical care and improving the mental health and well-being of communities that Providence serves. 

This is a huge national loss for the behavioral healthcare field. We currently are amidst a mental health and addiction crisis of historic proportions. Effective, continuing, integrative national policy leadership will be essential to guide us through these very troubled waters.

Well Being Trust has played a major leadership role for more than 5 years in focusing the entire field’s policy, action, and advocacy. One must go back almost 40 years to find an organization that exerted comparable integrative policy leadership. At that time, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded a national Policy Resource Center for several years. Subsequently, most policy work in the field has focused on the individual policy concerns of specific national organizations, with less frequent attention to joint action on broader issues of concern to the field.

Well Being Trust has provided more than $55 million to more than 240 partners since its inception. Impressively, this work has focused on development of a national strategy for behavioral healthcare, implementation of integrated care, and development of a national approach to foster mental health and well-being.

Now, it is essential that other entities step up to fill the void created by the departure of Well Being Trust from the national scene. Launched by the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention in April 2020, the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention National Response to COVID-19 would be an exceptionally suitable candidate to fulfill this role. This critical initiative, cochaired by NIMH Director Joshua Gordon, MD, PhD, and former US Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, founder of The Kennedy Forum, includes a broad range of partners and stakeholders, and already has released an Action Plan for Strengthening Mental Health and the Prevention of Suicide in the Aftermath of COVID-19.

Other national funders and behavioral healthcare leaders also must step forward to assure the future of the national response and its action plan, and to help fill the gap left by the departure of Well Being Trust. The action plan requires sustained efforts to advance it. Today, the national response's future is unclear, with questions about its funding going forward.

Through collaborative efforts, the CEO Alliance for Mental Health, an initiative of 14 top mental health organizations spurred by Well Being Trust, also can support this effort to fill our national leadership gap. Its Unified Vision for Transforming Mental Health and Substance Use Care shares the same fundamental priorities as the National Response's Action Plan.

The untimely departure of Well Being Trust from the national scene should give all of us great pause. At this time of crisis, we cannot survive without continuing and effective national policy leadership. I do hope that you will support our joint efforts to sustain national leadership that will focus our policy, action, and advocacy efforts to advance the fundamental system reforms that we all know are essential to address today’s crisis.

Ron Manderscheid, PhD, is the former president and CEO of NACBHDD and NARMH, as well as an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the USC School of Social Work.

The views expressed in Perspectives are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Behavioral Healthcare Executive, the Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Learning Network, or other Network authors. Perspectives entries are not medical advice.