This past week, we joined NAMI-MS, the Association of Mississippi Peer Support Specialists and the Mental Health Association of South Mississippi for Mental Health and Wellness Day at the Capitol. It was an inspiring day, and we thank every legislator who participated. We appreciate you!
The day’s theme was “Let’s Conversate Before You Legislate.” We urged legislators to commit to these principles in working with us:
• Never about us without us!
• Hearings aren’t hearings unless you hear from everyone!
• Committees about us should always include us!
• We want to support you!
Given these principles, we want to call your attention to HB 924. It is a very long bill—even the title is about two pages long. Legislators have amended it multiple times and even amended their amendments to it. Somewhere in the middle of multiple amendments in the Senate, senators added an executive committee to the Interagency Coordinating Council for Children and Youth (ICCCY) to this bill. (See lines 1709-1790 on pages 65 and 66 of the Senate’s Amendment Report for House Bill 924.) We are confused about how legislators made this change. Even though this bill is very long, it does not appear to have the relevant code sections to make this amendment.
We are even more concerned about the amendment itself. This amendment is the same language originally in (*now dead) SB 2597 that we shared with you in February. It creates an executive committee of the ICCCY that is comprised solely of agency heads with no families or family-run organizations. The ICCCY was created precisely to ensure that families and family-run organizations would be part of all decisions about the system of care for children’s mental health. Indeed, the same code section of state law that authorizes the ICCCY states: “The Mississippi Statewide System of Care shall be family-driven and …shall provide for… family participation in all aspects of planning, service delivery and evaluation.”
We believe that legislators likely had good intentions in creating this executive committee. They wanted the ICCCY to function more effectively. We get that. We do, too, and we want to work with legislators to make that happen. Legislators didn’t realize they were creating a committee that exemplifies “about us without us.” They didn’t have all of the information they needed. That’s why we are sharing this.
We implore House members to be very thoughtful about how they move forward with this bill now that they know this bill creates a committee to oversee the system of care for children’s mental health that exemplifies “about us without us.”
If legislators want to move this bill forward, we encourage them to either strike lines 1709-1790 (Section 6) of HB 924 or add the family-run organizations on the ICCCY to the executive committee. We also urge them to work with Families as Allies and families every step of the way when considering legislation or policy about children’s mental health. We want to work with all our partners to improve things for our children.
We’ve also contacted Wendy Bailey, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Mental Health, about our concerns and shared with her that we would like to work with her and the department to support legislators in understanding family-driven practice and the long history of system-of-care work in Mississippi. We have many strengths to build on, and we will get even stronger if we build on them together.
