Unless you are involved in the mental health/substance abuse community, you may not know what Samhsa is or why you should care what they do. You may have absently noted the name in various studies and reports in the news but not investigated any further. And why should you have? Just another group of initials from the government, right?

Samsha stands for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is a Health and Human Services agency that is required “to promote coordination of programs relating to mental illness throughout the federal government. “ They give grants for research, release reports and studies to the public and are supposed to coordinate the 112 separate programs in 8 federal agencies that relate to mental illness.

This week, the Government Accountability Office released a report criticizing the lack of high-level coordination that “hinders the federal government’s ability to develop an overarching perspective of its programs supporting and targeting individuals with serious mental illness.”

This affects YOU! Wonder why the government is squandering money and real improvements aren’t being made to the development and delivery of services to the people who need them the most? Pam Hyde, director of Samsha since 2009, believes that Samsha’s mission is mental health, not mental illness. The 2011-2014 plan doesn’t even mention schizophrenia or bipolar disorders.

There are more people with mental illness in jails and prisons than in state mental hospitals and yet Samsha declared a week in September “National Wellness Week” and recommended drinking smoothies and going line dancing.

I love a good smoothie, but I’d rather put our resources into removing barriers to treatment.