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California’s Children’s Mental Health Workforce

Policymakers and providers acknowledged a lack of child-serving mental health providers. In response, there are many policy proposals in the works focused on increasing the student-to-school counselor ratio or increasing the number of psychiatrists and psychologists in hospitals to meet demand for mental health services, but increasing the number of child-serving providers is not the whole story. To dig deeper into the issue, Children Now spent almost a year interviewing various providers across child-serving sectors to better understand opportunities and hindrances towards supporting the mental health of children and youth.