Prioritizing Wellbeing: People Over Bureaucracy
Mental health is healthcare, plain and simple. Yet for decades, our system has failed to treat it with the urgency, compassion, and seriousness it demands. Today, millions of Americans are silently battling anxiety, depression, trauma, and addiction, only to hit a wall of overwhelming structural barriers when they try to get help. It is an absolute failure of our healthcare system that mental health is treated as a secondary luxury rather than an essential human need. Families are forced to wait months for a single appointment, face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs, or navigate a confusing maze of insurance denials while in the middle of a crisis. We cannot separate this mental health epidemic from the daily economic pressures people face; housing insecurity, corporate exploitation, crushing medical debt, and constant digital stress are actively driving our communities into burnout and despair.
I am running for Congress to completely overhaul our approach to mental wellbeing and guarantee accessible, affordable care for every American. I will fight to aggressively increase federal funding to expand and diversify our mental health workforce, mandate that insurance companies provide true parity for mental and physical healthcare, and flood our schools, workplaces, and community centers with dedicated resources. We must also stop using the criminal justice system as a default response to mental health crises; instead, we must heavily invest in trained mobile crisis teams, community-led de-escalation, and rehabilitation networks. Seeking help is a sign of human strength, not weakness, and it is time for a federal government that actively invests in healing our communities instead of ignoring their pain.
