Roslyn Heights, NY, June 29, 2018 —North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, the preeminent not-for-profit children’s mental health agency on Long Island, is pleased to announce that the Guidance Center and its Executive Director, Andrew Malekoff, have been named as a recipient of the Leaders of Mental Health Awareness Awards from NAMI-NYS (the National Alliance on Mental Illness-New York State).
“Ensuring that people living with a mental illness have access to appropriate psychiatric services is of the utmost importance to NAMI-NYS,” says Matthew Shapiro, Associate Director, Public Affairs, NAMI-NYS. “One of the main barriers keeping people from these necessary treatments is a lack of insurance parity and network adequacy. This is a crucial issue which does not nearly receive the attention it deserves.”
In December 2017, North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center released Project Access, a year-long research study that asked 650 Long Islanders about the ease or difficulty of accessing mental health and addictions care. Some of the key findings:
- Almost half of the participants said that it was more difficult finding help for mental health or substance use problems than finding help for physical illnesses, especially when they were in crisis.
- Nearly 40% said that their insurance company did not have an adequate number of providers.
- Two thirds told us that their insurance company was not helpful to them in finding a suitable provider for themselves or a loved one.
Although health insurers are required by law to offer an adequate network of providers from which their beneficiaries can choose, the law is widely ignored. “It’s heartbreaking and infuriating that when someone makes the difficult decision to seek out professional help for a mental health or substance use problem, they often face enormous roadblocks, including a lack of providers who take their insurance or waiting lists of six months or even longer,” says Malekoff. “The difficulty people have getting care is not simply a matter of stigma and discrimination. This is a civil rights issue and often a matter of life and death.”
“We are tremendously grateful to Andrew Malekoff and North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center for the incredible work they are doing to raise awareness of this issue,” says NAMI’s Shapiro. “Their Project Access study detailing the struggles many individuals and families experience in trying to access care was eye-opening for many and has been a true catalyst for the reforms which are necessary to create a more mentally healthy New York State. It is truly an honor to recognize Andrew’s commitment to parity and network adequacy by
presenting him with one of the Leaders of Mental Health Awareness Awards, especially this October, which marks the 10-year anniversary of the federal Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.”
The award will be presented at NAMI’s 2018 Education Conference on the evening of Friday, October 26th in Albany, NY.
