Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul highlighted her $1 billion transformative, multi-year investment to overhaul the State's continuum of mental health care and drastically reduce the number of New Yorkers with unmet mental health needs. The Mental Health Care Plan was passed as part of the FY 2024 Budget, and will increase inpatient psychiatric treatment capacity, dramatically expand outpatient services, boost insurance coverage, and develop thousands of more units of supportive and transitional housing for people with mental illness. Governor Hochul made the announcement at the Delavan Grider Community Center in Buffalo, and was joined by Congressman Brian Higgins, Mayor Byron Brown, and mental health and community leaders. 

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event will be available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Wow. Thank you. Thank you. Nothing like playing on the home field once in a while. Really great to be here. It feels like a family reunion to come back to Western New York and to see the faces of so many people that have just - who make this community so outstanding in a place that I'm always going to be proud of to call my home.

And we are joined by some extraordinary leaders, people that I've come to work with for many, many years. And I want to give a special shout out to our Congressman Brian Higgins. Brian, please stand up. He is a champion for this region like no other. And we are the beneficiaries of his tenacity in ensuring that Western New York gets every dime it deserves and more. So he's a great fighter - Brian Higgins.

You'll be hearing from our great mayor, Byron Brown. I want to recognize him here as well. I'll be introducing him. You'll be hearing from Jeff Pirrone, the Executive Director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Buffalo and Erie County. Jeff, thank you. Where's Jeff? Jeff, thank you. Kevin Smith, the Director of Mental Health at the PEER Connection. Kevin will tell us his story as well. Kevin, thank you so much for being here today.

We have Thomas Beauford, the President of the Buffalo Urban League, has joined us. Thank you, Thomas. And Mayor Eddie Sundquist is all the way up from his community. Mayor, thank you for coming up from Jamestown and Mayor Willie Rosas from Dunkirk. Thank you for making the journey upward because this is a situation we're talking about. We're talking about mental health. It is not an urban issue. It is not a suburban issue. It is not a rural issue. It is a national crisis. And so, thank you for representing your region so well, as well as the other elected officials who've joined us who'll be acknowledged, briefly, shortly.

Also from my home team would be Commissioner Tim Hogues. Tim, stand up please. We pirated him away from Western New York, but he is the New York State Commissioner of Civil Service. And in the past, people would think of the word civil service and go, "Ugh." And now they say, "Yes!" He has liberated the ability for millions of New Yorkers to get access to good paying jobs by just rethinking our whole approach. And I want to thank him for being that transformative leader at a time we need him most. So, Tim Hogues, thank you. Thank you for what you do.

Dr. Ann Sullivan, the Commissioner of the Office of Mental Health, Dr. Ann Sullivan. You are incredible. She talks about this issue with such compassion and she travels every corner of the state, and she's a tremendous ally of those who need our services and all the great providers. Let's give a round of applause to Dr. Ann Sullivan.

Jihoon Kim has joined us as well. He's our Deputy Secretary for Mental Health and he is one of the architects of many of our great policies. I want to give him a shout out as well. Jihoon, where are you? Jihoon. And Supervisor of Amherst has joined us — Brian Kulpa. I just thought I saw you in the front row there as well.

Also, Candace — where are you? Candace? Candace Moppins. Where are you? Candace? Right there. Right, right. I should have noticed you right off the bat and thank you for allowing us to come to this place. Sometimes, the occasions are sad. Sometimes they're joyful and sometimes it's just an opportunity for us to gather.

But you have done an incredible job with this facility, Candace. It is a refuge for so many in this neighborhood, a place people gather and know that it's a safe space for them, and I thank you for your friendship over many, many years. Let's give her around applause.

And it is a gathering place. It was just around this time one year ago when we welcomed President Biden and the first lady who came here to console our city after the Tops tragedy, the Tops Massacre. They came to wrap their arms around us to give us care and comfort and empathy. And you think about those traits, it's something that we've all tried to give to this community over this last year. It's been so difficult. The trauma was felt by the immediate families, but that trauma had a ripple effect. It just sort of penetrated this community and it gave us a sense of vulnerability. And what is so sad is that, you know, we saw a shoulder to cry on and many to trust and confide in, but you never know the real scars that are internal, that live with people for a long time. 

And so, people from this event and others have had to seek out services to help them carry that weight so they are not alone. And even those who don't have a direct connection to Buffalo and what happened here, we all need help at different times in our lives, and it's to say that and acknowledge that is something that people have felt ashamed to talk about. There was always a stigma associated with how you cope with life. Whether you can have the resiliency that sometimes the human spirit is called upon to display when sometimes things are so horrific. And I have to think after the acknowledgment that we just experienced our 200th mass shooting this year, that it reopens the wounds for a community like Buffalo.

The families have to be re-traumatized again because they know that searing emotion that says, "Why my son, why my daughter, why my father, why my wife, my husband, my grandma? Why?" And there are no answers. And then you couple that trauma on top of the lingering effects of the pandemic, which three years ago when it was just something we're getting familiar with and thinking it's going to be over by summer in 2020.

That still has scars on all of us. And since the pandemic, more than one in three New Yorkers have sought medical mental health care, one in three New Yorkers. Now, to me that is a positive and that people sought health care. They sought the help, or they know someone who has, but it also means there's probably a lot of other people that are still living with it.

And you know what's incredible is our young people are reporting distress unlike anything we've ever seen. And those who had their lives turned upside down when they're just getting used to the environment of a classroom and the security of leaving their home, and sometimes the home life is not a nurturing environment at all. The school is their refuge. They go there and there's teachers, there's administrators, there's people care about them. There's a connection with others in their situation, other classmates. And to all those whose lives were turned upside down with the experiment of remote learning. And God bless our teachers and the parents who had to become teachers at the dining room table, for what they went through.

But looking back, it, it was a not a bright spot in that time because our kids fell behind and they fell hard. And also, that disconnection from life milestones. The missed graduations, the missed junior prom, and all those things that you feel connected to others. And people found comfort in social media in a different world unrelated to physical human connection.

So, you know, they say that a Pew study showed that 41 percent of American adults reported psychological distress in the last couple years, but the number is almost 60 percent when it comes to young people between 18 and 29. And this moment is interesting to have this conversation because May is National Mental Health Awareness Month.

I think we're all aware of it. I think in past years it was just one of those days, you wear the colors, you pass, you move on. I think it has real meaning to us this year after what we've been through. It's also the start of the National Children's Mental Health Awareness Week as well. 

So, you look back where we are today, we know what the stressors have been on all of us today. But throughout history, no state has really leaned hard into saying, we're going to help, we're going to find solutions. We are part of the challenge in finding the right answers. And there's been so many barriers, it's hard to get an appointment for those who finally say, "I want help." And it's a tough realization to say, "I need help."

But then it takes a long time to get an appointment. Sometimes insurance wouldn't cover the services. So, it was just going to be out of pocket. And does that mean you're not going to be able to make ends meet very easily that week when the cost of eggs and diapers and kids' sneakers are off the charts?

So, you prioritize someone else over yourself. As parents often do. There's long awaits in hospital beds and people fall through the cracks. Sometimes they're visible, sometimes you see them, and we think about the young man, Jordan Neely, who was in New York City in the throes of a crisis who was tragically killed on the subway this week. His death is clear evidence that we need support. We need alternatives for these individuals, so they're not relegated to that kind of life. So, those of us in government, it is a wakeup call. It is saying, society is frayed right now, our people are hurting. And shame on us if we don't step up and say, "No, we're here to help. We can do something. We have the resources." We just have to dedicate them to the services that we know will work over time.

And that's exactly what I focused on in this Budget. I came out and said, "We're going big. This crisis has hit too many New Yorkers. It is too painful." And in my Budget that I announced in January, I said, "I am putting forth $1 billion to make a historic investment to transform our State's mental health care systems, our whole delivery system, and enhance everything about it." The last time in State government that we paid attention — the last time people paid much attention to the State's role in mental health services was the deinstitutionalization that occurred in the 1970s.

My family lived in Hamburg, not too far from the West Seneca Developmental Center. My parents were very much social activists. Every cause they're involved in, they brought all of us. And my parents started being involved in a program to help young people who would be unlocked from living in that institution to be out in society. Now, open the doors and all of a sudden after spending most of your life here, if you're 16 or 18 years old and you're on your own, would be kind of cruel.

So, they found volunteer families like ours, and we took in two young adults. Melanie and Roger. And our job when I was probably 13 at the time, 14, was to take Melanie when she'd come stay with us - walk to the Village of Hamburg, take her to the little five and dime, the little Wolver store, teach her how to buy things, go to the grocery store, the Bell's IGA on the corner. And we also took Roger, my brothers took him to play sports.

And so, that's like a microcosm of the way it worked for a little while. I don't think it helped 99 percent of the people, they were just left out there on the streets - coupled that with many of our veterans who came back with mental health problems from Vietnam, because no one acknowledged what they had gone through, including many of my uncles and family members who still feel the effects.

We ignored everybody. We just sweep it under the rug and maybe they'll go away. Until now - we have a crisis. So, I've been Governor a year and a half. My first budget as an elected Governor, I said, "This changes. This changes right here and right now." And so, I needed to hear from our leaders, you know, what is the answer? I didn't know the answers, but I'm smart enough to know who to ask. And we pulled together a team, in government, outside government, the providers. Tell us, all of you who've lived the experience of helping people, what it's going to take, and we have to focus on the whole continuum of care.

What does that mean? Continuum of care? It means everything. It means preventative. And I'll be doing some forums with young people as I started already to meet with them and talk about how we can invest in supporting young people in school. So, their problems today don't become crises as adults. So, it's that early intervention in our youth. Also, hit people at different stages, a lifeline for people.

And it's also saying if someone needs to be in a hospital for mental health services and they're discharged, they're not just - we're not done with them. We have to say, "Before you go, here's the next step. Here's the counselor, here's the therapist. Here's where we show up. Here's the supportive services. Here is the facility where you can go sleep tonight so you're not left on the streets." Our city is an outstanding example of how to do this right. Out of 13 certified behavioral health clinics across the state, three of them are here right in our city, three out of 13 across the state. BestSelf, Endeavor, Spectrum, I want to applaud them. Please stand up because they're doing God's work. They're doing God's work. Thank you. Thank you. BestSelf, Endeavor, Spectrum, thank you. Thank you.  

These are places that offer 24-hour-a-day mental health services, substance abuse services as well. And there's a lot of overlap, lot of people find comfort and escape in substance abuse because of mental health challenges. You know, there's not that - there's that sense of longing. There's a sense of need. There's a sense of loneliness and just, you know, reading the paper today — and I still read a piece of paper instead of online every time. You know, the surgeon general is now giving advice on how to feel less lonely. Now, usually the surgeon general is saying, "Don't smoke, get vaccinated, get your flu shots." And now they're trying to tell us, because this clearly is symbolic of the fact that this is a national crisis.  

So, the good news is there are organizations, you know, who walk through these doors, people who walk through these doors, these organizations, regardless of your age, regardless of insurance status, you can get a whole comprehensive array of services. And these clinics are game changers. But guess what? Three is not enough in Buffalo. Thirteen is not enough statewide, and we're going to be tripling the number from 13 to 39 this year already.

So, we're going to increase the numbers. We expect to spend — we'll help several hundred thousand more people with this expansion alone and also people without insurance. As I mentioned, the cost of everything, my Budget that was just enacted prohibits insurance companies from denying access to critical mental health and substance abuse disorder services. Now, the insurance companies have to cover. That is going to be a big step for making sure that everyone has access to quality health care.  

We're also adding psychiatric beds. You know, what happened during the pandemic? A lot of beds had to be transitioned into COVID beds, but we haven't needed that for a while. And there was a disparity in reimbursements also. Mental health services are very expensive. One bed requires psychiatric nurses. You need to have, you know, a doctor with a psychiatric background. So, the costs are extraordinary. And so, we are working with the hospitals to get more beds back online but understanding there's more costs involved with that.

You made all these changes, turning them into COVID beds, flipping them back. There's more securities required. I'm seeing Tom Quatroche from ECMC. Thank you, Tom. You know, Tom has told me firsthand, you know, their desire to bring more beds online, but it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money for hospitals that are still hurting from a little revenue loss from the pandemic. I understand that. Tom calls me all the time about it. So, more beds online and that's just to start. And also, you know, we're going to continue serving people any way we can — outpatient services, the reintegration as I mentioned, freeing up needed space for inpatient care. But also, there's one element that you heard me talk about in my Budget, and that is housing. The whole continuum of care requires people to ultimately not be living in a hospital bed, not living on the streets, but in a home that is safe, has supportive services, wraparound, and we'll take care of you like a big hug. And that's what wraparound means to me.  

And so, we're going to be building more of that housing. We're investing in 3,500 more housing units that'll provide these intensive mental health services to help someday liberate people from the demons that have taken over their lives so they can walk out someday and say, "I'm free. I'm free. I'm going to be okay. I can provide for myself. I can someday take care of a family."

And also, as we mentioned, substance abuse disorder, you know, opioid addiction. My gosh, seems like, you know, I remember, not long ago, just opening the newspaper and seeing all the obituaries and the faces were so young. They used to be, old people — old like me now. I used to read the paper, and then now you see all these beautiful young people. Opioid deaths have increased 150 percent from 2018 to 2021. We were making progress. We have turned the corner somewhat because I've been tracking this since my days on the Town Board with Tom. You know, we started seeing the numbers go up. The police would tell us there's kids overdosing from heroin. What do you mean heroin in Hamburg? Yeah. It was happening 12, 15 years ago. We started turning the corner, and then COVID just hit like this, and all the support system going to a therapist, and not having the beds available, it all collapsed again. And that's what we're trying to get out from under.

And the use of fentanyl, which is so deadly, and other derivatives from that, you know, so many families, including my own, lost a loved one. And this has to stop. So we can't once again say, "Well, we can't do anything about it. It's just too much. The scale is too big, it's too widespread." We don't give up. We lean harder into the problem. We say, "There has to be an alternative for these people that are so lonely, so depressed, so stressed out with life that they turn to this."

We have to give them better alternatives. And that is something I'm going to be committed to with every waking moment I am your Governor, because I believe we can do so much more. We have to expand our lifesaving tools, Naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and drug testing technology.

And lastly, I'll talk about our kids. As I mentioned a little bit, I did convene a group of teenagers, ages 14 to 18 in the Bronx recently. Kids came from all over. They had fascinating stories to tell, and I said, "What was it like to live during the pandemic?" They all had stories to tell, and this group of individuals said that there was nobody for teenagers to talk to. Nobody understood what we were going through. We kind of went through this alone.

And a couple of young women, I was so impressed, had said, "I kind of became the therapist. They all come to me." Remember, Dr. Sullivan? They were talking about this. And she said, Even my father who was depressed, he would talk to me at the end of the day and my friends would call me," she goes. I said, "Who did you talk to, sweetheart?" She said, "I didn't have anybody." I was just absorbing all this. I'm in awe of these kids.

But these kids said to me, I said, "What should we do?" They said, "We should need more peer counseling." They don't want to talk to adults sometimes. "Train us, train us, tell us what we need to know. Let us be that ambassador. Let us tell them they're going to be okay. Let us be that beacon of hope for these other young people in our classrooms." And I was so optimistic when I left that - we're just getting started. We're going to continue convening these groups all over the state.

But their isolation from the pandemic, what's going on in their neighborhoods, and neighborhoods are tough. There are some really tough neighborhoods. Nobody wants their kids to have to endure that. I'm the first mom to become a Governor of the State of New York. And it is some connection that I can't overlook. I look at little kids as all part of my own family. And we have to help them. They need our help.

And you know, the statistics are staggering. And these teenage girls are - 30 percent of them are considering suicide. I mean, teenage girls are supposed to have a more carefree life, perhaps, you know, getting excited about the next chapter, and they're feeling the weight of such depression that they'd rather consider the alternative to life.

That's almost up 60 percent from a decade ago. So they're falling fast and they're falling hard. And it's a full grown crisis. This is more than a call to action. It is a moral imperative to do something to help our people. These are God's children.

So we have to connect the kids to school-based services and continue making these investments in guidance counselors and therapists and social workers in so many schools. I'm describing the job of the teachers. They're expected to do all this. It is too much. We are putting a record amount of money, $34.5 billion in education this year, and I'm saying to all of our schools, you've never seen this kind of money before, but I know you're under stress, but you need to use that to bring in mental health counselors into the schools. Every school needs somebody and not just one person for 700, which is what these children in the Bronx told me. Well, we have a therapist. We have 700 kids in our school, and you can't get an appointment for months. That's not satisfactory. We need to just embed this into our education system. It's right there on site. Something bad happening at home, they have someone to talk to. Something bad happening in school, there's someone there to talk to.

We catch them before they fall too hard because if they fall hard. We'll be spending a lifetime getting them back up. This is the time you capture them, so we're going to ensure that we have support for them as well. Social media, that's another whole topic. That's another whole topic. It's one thing to get bullied and picked on, and I wasn't the coolest kid in my middle school. I came home from a Catholic grade school, and I was kind of an outlier. Okay? It was a little — wasn't really friendly. It was kind of rough, but nowhere near what these kids are dealing with. You know, someone can be mean to you to your face, and you walk out, and you cry, but you know, you're not getting this constant saturation about your image. It's morning, noon, and night from social media. And it's a whole different ballgame than we as adults had to deal with. And we need to be understanding that. Don't say, "Well, we are tougher than you." Like, no, you have no idea what these kids are going through. We have no clue and it's hard.

So, next month we're convening summit. We're going to bring together stakeholders from all of us. We're going to focus on teenage mental health, what the answers are, and I want to be creative. Let's be creative. This is New York, my friends. People are used to looking to us for leadership, being ahead of our time as we've been in so many movements. This is a movement to recapture the heart and soul of our people and to give them hope — those who are struggling. And those who are blessed not to be struggling, it is our responsibility to help our brothers and sisters who are. It's that simple. It's that simple. So hopefully, we'll walk out of here with a renewed commitment to what we have to do as elected officials and those of us blessed to be in government and those of you who are running the hospitals and running the facilities, the health care operations and the behavioral health facilities, and God bless every one of you. You're sitting in this room because you care. You have a heart. You're sitting here because you care about other people. And I don't take that for granted.

So, the world we want to live in, we're defining it right now. We're defining it today, and we'll make sure that people have what they need. We'll never turn away from our most vulnerable, and we'll make sure that no one gets left behind. It's a new era for New York. We're declaring it so. We're taking on this crisis head on. And thank every one of you in this room and across the state proving part of this journey together. Thank you very much.