It’s Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week, and we are encouraged to see some positive trends continuing as the pandemic fades into the past.

Back in 2021, the national percentage of high schoolers feeling sad and hopeless rose to 42%, a peak after several years of worsening scores. Since then, here in Rhode Island, key internal indicators we track at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island have been moving steadily in the right direction for members ages 18 and under. 

From 2021 to 2024, we have seen year-over-year improvements for both inpatient admissions (down 25%) and for emergency department visits (down 13%). 

For those of us working in mental health, the pandemic exposed a problem we had seen growing for years and prompted the U.S. surgeon general to issue an advisory calling on the nation to “step up for children.” Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island had already recognized we had an important role to play. In 2018, we eliminated many prior authorization requirements for mental health services to improve access to care.

After carefully considering how we could best serve our members and their communities, we launched a three-year plan in 2023 aimed at supporting the mental health of 110,000 Rhode Island youths and children, about half of the state’s under 18 population. 

Highlights of the plan include:

• Assisting vulnerable populations: We worked with providers in our behavior health network to increase the availability of urgent appointments, potentially avoiding unnecessary visits to hospital emergency departments, and we collaborated with Bradley Hospital on offering clinicians free autism and anxiety training, plus stipends, to help them better serve children and youth.
• Early identification and treatment: We increased reimbursement rates for early intervention care, offered incentives to pediatric primary care sites to integrate behavioral health care into their practices, expanded virtual care options, supported behavioral health startup Braver’s use of trained coaches to ramp up its exposure therapy program for children’s anxiety, and provided assistance to school-based mental health intervention programs, including Project SUCCESS and Mood Check.
• Prevention and awareness: We coordinated Teen Mental Health First Aid trainings, promoted digital emotional wellness coaching for parents and caregivers through The Greatest 8, seeded the expansion of the Chris Collins Foundation’s school-based peer-to-peer program and supported youth recreation programs run by Recess Rocks in RI and Boys & Girls Clubs.

We’re encouraged by our progress so far. Over the past two years, we estimate that our collaborative efforts have helped touch the lives of about 130,000 youths, exceeding our original goal, and we are likely to surpass 200,000 by the end of 2025. 

We’ve named just some of our valued partners here, but they and many others are foundational to the goals of our plan. They share our commitment to building healthier families and communities and we’re proud to support their efforts to launch and grow programs and services that promote the wellbeing and mental health of Rhode Island youths. 

Clearly, there is still work to do. For example, the just-released 2025 RI KIDS COUNT Factbook noted that there was a significant increase in mental health hospitalizations for children on Medicaid in 2024 and that the number of calls to the Kids’ Link RI triage service, although down in 2024, still totaled 5,386.

We know we join all our partners throughout May in recognizing Mental Health Awareness Month — a time to reflect on the progress we’ve made and, importantly, to recommit ourselves to creating safe and supportive environments, promoting mental health education, reducing, and ensuring access to high quality mental health care.

Sarah Fleury is the managing director of behavioral health at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of RI.

Carolyn Belisle is vice president of corporate social responsibility for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island.

This piece first ran in the Rhode Island Current.