The Texas legislature should view with skepticism claims that Texas is not spending enough money on this issue.
Texas has taken significant steps to improve access to mental health care in recent years. This has included one-time funding investments and systematic reforms.
Despite these legislative steps and historic investments in mental and behavioral health, there remain concerns that access to mental healthcare in Texas continues to fall short. By some metrics, Texas is ranked as the worst state in the nation for mental health, and not for the first time. A recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found Texas outpaces the national average in some negative mental health outcomes, including rates of children without insurance and suicide rates.
It is worth noting that a significant amount of available mental health data is from mid-COVID when mental health was demonstrably poorer for many individuals and access to non-emergent inpatient services was limited. For this reason, data and trends as compared to contemporaneous information from other states can be more indicative of the state of care in Texas than data compared to prior years in Texas.
While there are certainly concerns about the state of mental health in Texas, there is both a lag in data accumulation and expenditure of appropriated funds. House Bill 1, the budget bill from the 88th Legislative Session that provided a historic investment in mental health services, was not signed into law until mid-June of 2023. Agencies then had to disburse funds, issue Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and review responses, new positions had to be filled, and some programs were completely innovative and therefore also required rulemaking.
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