CT News Junkie highlights 2025 progress on children's behavioral health

A July 1 article in CT News Junkie recaps progress on children's behavioral health during the 2025 Connecticut legislative session, citing several CHDI staff and partners.

The piece, "Behavioral Health Board Reviews 2025 Legislative Wins, Outlines Next Steps," highlights several important wins from the session, including:

• The passage of Public Act 25-94 to strengthen mental health parity enforcement and patient protections among CT health insurers, which CHDI has supported for many years
• The passage of Public Act 25-89 to improve abuse and neglect reporting and establish a working group on supporting youth with co-occurring behavioral health and developmental or intellectual disabilities
• A new statewide children's behavioral health system data dashboard, which CHDI is in the final stages of developing with the Children's Behavioral Health Plan Implementation Advisory Board's Data Integration workgroup

The article also describes some of the remaining challenges CHDI and our partners have been sounding the alarm on this year, including the lack of private insurance reimbursement for services offered by the state's new Urgent Crisis Centers for youth and similar funding issues for mobile crisis. 

Project Coordinator Alyssa Korell, PhD, is quoted in the piece discussing the children's behavioral health system data dashboard CHDI is currently developing with the advisory board. 

“The intent of the dashboard was really to look at available data across the system and kind of bring it into one place," Korell is quoted as saying.

The interactive dashboard - which will be shared publicly on Plan4Children.org once finalized - brings together key metrics from state agencies, providers, schools, youth survey data, and other sources to track trends across the state’s children’s behavioral health system. 

Director of System Development and Policy Aleece Kelly, MPP, is also cited in the article for highlighting "the need to expand and sustainably fund peer and family support services, which remain unreimbursed under Medicaid despite broad support and calls for greater diversity and lived experience."

Kelly is currently working on a report on the benefits of expanding the youth and family peer support workforce, to be released later this year.

Integrating system-level data collection and expanding family and peer support were both recommended in 2023's Strengthening the Behavioral Health Workforce for Children, Youth, and Families: A Strategic Plan for Connecticut, which Kelly co-authored (with CHDI's Jason Lang and Yale's Michael Hoge). That plan provided a blueprint to address the ongoing behavioral health workforce shortage, building upon recommendations in the state's comprehensive 2014 Behavioral Health Plan for Children.

CHDI hopes to see the state legislature address some of these pressing funding challenges in a special session later this year.

Read the full CT News Junkie article here:

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Stay tuned for an announcement of when the statewide data dashboard will be available for public viewing - and watch for our forthcoming report on expanding the youth and family peer support workforce coming later this year!