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The Communities That Care Coalition of Franklin County and the North Quabbin is featured in a new book from Oxford University Press on Investing in Children’s Mental Health as one of the best available investments in children’s mental health. The authors, Daniel Eisenberg (professor of health economics at UCLA) and Ramesh Raghavan (mental health researcher and professor at NYU), present five case studies to forward society’s thinking on three questions: (1) What are some of the best available investments to improve the mental health of children and adolescents in the United States? (2) To what extent are these investments being made? and (3) What can practitioners, child-serving organizations, policymakers, and other stakeholders do to promote such investments? 

The authors attended several CTC coalition and workgroup meetings and the book contains a glowing chapter on our coalition. The authors make note of the community’s longstanding collaborative culture, of the coalition’s “informal approach” balanced with “clear professionalism and dedication,” explaining that “The inclusive and collaborative culture appears to welcome, rather than deflect or resist, difficult questions and potentially competing groups and ideas,” and “By nearly every measure, the results of the coalition’s work have been impressive.”

The Communities That Care Coalition is one of the sponsors of an upcoming training series, The How of Child and Family Engagement. The focus is primarily on helping providers connect with and support family relationships as parents navigate the challenges of the early childhood years. It’s designed to strengthen parent-provider relationships as well as relationships within families. 

The US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has called for Congress to act to require Warning Labels on social media platforms like we have for tobacco and alcohol. Dr. Murthy argues that the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. He says that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.

Read the full article in the New York Times HERE.