NGA Chair New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy opened the first plenary session of the 2023 NGA Annual Meeting with an overview of his 2022-2023 Chair’s Initiative: Strengthening Youth Mental Health, noting the plenary session would serve as the culmination of his yearlong NGA Chair’s Initiative that he first introduced in July 2022 to help harness the bipartisan efforts and national focus on youth mental health to develop policy solutions to respond to the rising rates of mental health distress among the country’s young people.
At the start of the plenary session, Governor Murphy unveiled “Strengthening Youth Mental Health: A Governor’s Playbook.” The playbook resulted from four convenings Governor Murphy held across the country during the past year to meet with close to 500 stakeholders and experts, including individuals with lived experience, to discuss the current state of youth mental health systems, best practices, and implementable, impactful solutions for all states. The written playbook aims to help Governors understand the best practices for youth mental health systems through examples of replicable and impactful solutions that are already underway across the country, with context for…
