Colorado youth‑mental‑health advocates have released a new playbook urging the next governor to streamline the state’s sprawling system of services and appoint a single leader to oversee them.

In addition to hosting a gubernatorial candidate forum, Mind Our Future Colorado released the policy-based playbook on Thursday. The playbook includes recommendations for how the state’s next leader can address the youth mental health crisis, both immediately and in the long-term.

Recognizing the state’s budget constraints, many of the recommendations are low‑ or no‑cost, said Zach Zaslow, Children’s Hospital’s vice president of Advocacy and Community Health.

Mind Our Future is calling for the next governor to appoint a chief children’s youth mental health officer to oversee more than 70 state programs that provide mental health services to young people.

The recommended position is modeled on the Chief Officer for Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation, created by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2022.

Currently, Colorado’s mental and behavioral health agencies are siloed, acting in isolation and making it difficult for families to get connected with the appropriate level of care, Zaslow explained.

“We’re not holding the state bureaucracy accountable,” he said. “There’s nobody in charge with the authority and the responsibility to ensure that all the different state agencies and programs are working together to get families and kids what they need, and that’s something that really doesn’t cost anything. It’s not creating a whole new agency or whole new office, it’s just saying we need somebody accountable who reports directly to the governor who can track outcomes and make sure that we’re moving the needle in the right direction.”

The playbook also calls for the creation of an annual report card to track the state’s progress on increasing mental health care access and decreasing youth suicide rates, and establishing a “Thriving Youth Trust Fund,” to be paid for with donations, digital platform fees, settlement money from lawsuits against social media companies, and enforcement revenue.

Early prevention and intervention are also key facets of Mind Our Future’s playbook, which calls for suicide prevention and peer support programs in schools and training parents and educators on warning signs.

“If we’re successful, we’re preventing young people from reaching a mental health crisis,” said Ewing. “We’re not investing more dollars in treatment, we’re investing in things that keep kids healthy and doing well, and that costs significantly less than a residential treatment stay or an emergency hospitalization.”

According to the Mind Our Future coalition’s website, Colorado ranks 31st in the nation for youth mental health and 41st for mental health overall. Suicide is the leading cause of death for youth under 18, and a recent poll found that a quarter of the state’s high schoolers say they regularly feel sad or hopeless.

In 2021, Children’s Hospital Colorado issued its first state of emergency for youth mental health. The pandemic had taken a serious toll on youth mental health statewide, and there were several weeks that year where suicide-related events were the number one reason for emergency room visits at Children’s.

While medical professionals described children’s mental health as the worst they had ever seen during the pandemic, five years later, they say the situation has changed — in some ways for the better and in others for the worse.

Social media and artificial intelligence have become integral parts of young lives, and while they can provide a creative outlet and social connection, they can also be seriously detrimental to mental health.

Josh Ewing, executive director of Healthier Colorado, said, “You think about the rise of social media and AI and the prevalence of devices in the hands of our students, and that’s all come at a time when we’ve seen funding for after-school programming and the things that we know drive social connection and social well-being for young people; funding for those types of things has been cut.”

While the suicide rate among Colorado youth has decreased since 2021, the need for care has exploded, according to Zaslow.

“Fewer kids are ending their own lives, which is great news, but we’re seeing even more kids with really complex or challenging mental health needs seeking our emergency services or inpatient services, and that’s not what we want to see,” he said “We want to see kids getting early support at their pediatrition or in their school in their community rather than having to come to a hospital level of care, which is disruptive and restrictive and expensive and all those things.”

Under Gov. Jared Polis, lawmakers established several programs to expand access to mental health care for Colorado kids, including I Matter, which provides up to six free therapy sessions to those under 18.

Zaslow said the state also invested a significant amount of American Rescue Plan Act dollars in residential treatment beds and mental health screening services, but those funds have dried up, and the state is in the midst of a severe budget crisis.

According to Zaslow, the need persists, yet all federal funding has been depleted, and resources are fully exhausted.