Sliding Back into Ignorance Will Not Be Good for Children and Families

I have been scouring the internet looking for impacts of cuts to SAMHSA which stand to decimate mental health support to states, particularly those grants serving children and youth. A former highly respected staffer reported massive federal layoffs, “including elimination of whole departments.” She listed affected riffed departments as follows:

  • Office of Technical Assistance and Coordination

  • Office of Program Analysis and Coordination

  • Child, Adolescent, and Family Branch

  • Mental Health Promotion Branch

  • State and Consumer Protection Branch

  • Comprehensive Services and Systems Branch

  • Office of Communications

She reported that EVERYONE at SAMHSA serving children and youth were riffed (everyone in the Child, Adolescent, and Family Branch, and in School Mental Health).

The Washington Post reports that exact numbers are difficult to find because staff have been locked out of their government email accounts (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/10/13/cdc-layoffs-reversed-aspr-samhsa/ ). I am remembering the time before there were effective mental health supports for children. Jane Knitzer wrote her seminal report on our collective failure of children and youth with mental health needs in 1982 (https://digital.lib.utk.edu/collections/islandora/object/cdf%3A220/datastream/PDF/view ). My family lived it. Aaron was 4 years old and we were just entering that hellscape in 1982. Because of her report, the Child and Adolescent Service System Program (CASSP) was created and funded by Congress in 1984 to build a comprehensive mental health system to support children and youth with severe emotional disturbance (term used to refer to serious mental illness in children) and their families. That effort grounded the Systems of Care initiatives that brought us strength based practices, wraparound, and family to family supports in community as an alternative to either doing nothing or leaving families in the horrific dilemma of relinquishing custody to the state to access care for our kids. Aaron was six in 1984 and it would be many years before those groundbreaking efforts came to my state and still we were unable to access them until too late. Read No Saints and ask yourself if you are okay with going back to my family’s experience. That is the choice.

It is heartbreaking to be at this place after so many years of hard work. The staff being let go have the institutional memory and without them this slog begins again, but like Aaron and my family, families who need effective mental health support today fall through the cracks. We have sacrificed too much to have everything we fought so hard for disappear. This is not okay.

I will come back and update as I learn more.