JB Pritzker and Juliana Stratton Address City Club of Chicago on Mental Health and Eliminating Stigma

Statement

This morning, JB Pritzker and Juliana Stratton addressed the City Club of Chicago on mental health, eliminating the stigma, and the path forward.

In their speeches, Juliana spoke about the legislation she passed in Springfield on mental health while JB highlighted how 80,000 Illinoisans lost access to mental healthcare during Bruce Rauner's budget crisis and how mental health is incorporated into the plans he's released throughout the campaign. Watch their full remarks HERE.

Excerpt from Juliana Stratton's remarks:

I'm a lifelong advocate for restorative justice and criminal justice reform. It's how I approach this conversation and it's how I approach much of my work as a state representative. I've seen firsthand how important mental health is across every aspect of what I do.

I've seen it in students who told me that they don't want more police in their schools, they want more school counselors. It's why I worked to ban police booking stations from school grounds.

I've seen it in parents who watched their children get expelled from preschool -- primarily black and brown boys, but increasingly black and brown girls expelled -- instead of getting the care they needed. It's why I worked to pass legislation banning preschool expulsions here in Illinois. Instead of expelling our youngest children, how about we bring services to our families and interrupt the school to prison pipeline -- which I call the preschool to prison pipeline -- let's interrupt it before it starts.

I've seen it in my work reforming the criminal justice system. I want to tell you all a story about a woman named Maria who was kind and brave enough to share her story with me. Maria shared her experience in the criminal justice system in a way that has stuck with me ever since. She told me this: first she was in prison, then she went to prison, then she came home to prison.

For Maria, her incarceration didn't end when she was released from the Illinois Department of Corrections. It continued in a community so disinvested in, so under resourced, that to her it felt like another prison.

I was struck by that. I was struck by how many women in our prisons want to build better lives when they go home, how many want to be better mothers when they go home, but end up fighting against a system that isn't set up to help them and they end up enduring more trauma.

Together, Maria and I and so many more justice-involved women introduced the Women's Correctional Services Act. It helps women in prison get trauma-informed support specifically tailored to them. When Maria came to testify on our bill, it could not have been a more powerful firsthand testimony. I'm proud the bill passed into law as the first of its kind in the nation and that more women are now getting the trauma informed mental healthcare that they need to re-enter their communities.

Excerpt from JB Pritzker's remarks:

I will fight for a budget that funds substance abuse treatment and mental health services because I believe that every individual who struggles with addiction, like my mother, or those who struggle with mental health issues, deserve to be supported. They deserve to not only survive but also to realize their full potential.

Let me just say that watching what Bruce Rauner did to addiction and mental health services during his budget crisis shook me to my core. Families were turned upside down. It is and was unconscionable.

27 public health departments across our state had to reduce staff or services. More than 1,000 mental health workers and substance use clinicians were laid off or had their hours decreased. 80,000 Illinoisans lost access to services.

Take the Wells Center in Jacksonville, Illinois. After serving the community for 49 years, the Wells Center was forced to close its doors and lay off 68 of its staffers. The opioid epidemic in Central Illinois didn't go away when the Center closed. But people went untreated. And families suffered.

Or the Rosecrance Triage Center, a not-for-profit behavioral health organization based in Rockford. They offered vital inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services 24 hours a day. But in 2015, the budget impasse forced Rosecrance to cut back to 11 hours a day. Now think about the consequences of that. Individuals in crisis who encountered police had to be put in jail rather than being treated. Others were brought to emergency rooms and were kept there overnight until staff arrived at Rosecrance to support them.

Getting treated like a criminal or not getting treatment when you're in crisis, these are the human costs of failing to prioritize addiction and mental health treatment.

If we want to prioritize these, we need to internalize that addiction and mental health do not exist in silos. They are part of our overall health as human beings.

That's one reason that I feel so strongly that we need to reform our broken healthcare system. Healthcare is a right, not a privilege. And that includes mental healthcare. But it sure doesn't seem like Bruce Rauner agrees. He was silent when Donald Trump attempted to take away a million people's healthcare in the state of Illinois. And again last month he vetoed a bill to protect Illinoisans from junk healthcare plans that would allow insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions like mental illness and addiction.

We need to finally acknowledge that mental health -- that is, the health of our brains -- is not separate from the health of our bodies.

I understand that mental health must be woven into the fabric of public policy. That's why so many of the policy plans that I've rolled out incorporate mental health components.

You will see that my opioid plan recognizes the increased danger of drug addiction in patients with mental illness. My plan will restore treatment, housing, and workforce development supports that were decimated under Bruce Rauner.

And we will look for ways to expand capacity across the state for treatment services. Bruce Rauner proposed slashing funding for addiction treatment by 20 percent. And a 2016 study placed Illinois in the bottom three states for providing publicly funded addiction treatment -- bottom three. Healthcare companies need to help, and they need to cover addiction like any other condition.

You'll see that my Veteran's plan commits to working with communities so we can recruit and retain qualified medical personnel and expand access to healthcare, including mental healthcare, particularly in rural areas of our state. According to the RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research, 20 percent of Veterans, 20 percent, who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from depression or PTSD. 20 percent. If we want to honor these men and women like heroes, as appropriate, let's get them the treatment they deserve.

You'll see that my domestic violence prevention plan puts an emphasis on counseling and therapy in addition to legal services, shelter, and job training to provide survivors of domestic violence with the resources to successfully deal with and leave abusive relationships. Studies show children who witness domestic violence struggle in school and they struggle with social development. Survivors and their families need trauma-informed care that domestic violence shelters can provide, but those shelters have suffered massive cuts or were eliminated by Bruce Rauner's budget crisis.

And you'll see in my commitment to LGBTQ rights that I believe we must invest in social service agencies, including mental health providers, that address the unique challenges facing the LGBTQ community. Unlike Bruce Rauner, as part of a balanced budget every year, we will actually fund programs for homeless youth, mental health, and HIV prevention, testing and treatment.

A governor should understand the interconnected nature of mental health in all aspects of public policy -- because if we prioritize mental health, we prioritize saving lives.

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