Healthy Minds' impact in 2025
Helping policymakers and community leaders advance data-driven strategies to overcome our state's substance use challenges and meet the mental health needs of all Oklahomans.
2025 at a glance
A trusted partner for communities
In Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Edmond, we partnered with community leaders to ease burdens on emergency responders and connect people in mental health crisis with an appropriate mental health response.
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Steadiness in the face of major changes
Healthy Minds was a source of clarity amid uncertainty around state and federal funding changes. Despite the disruption, Oklahoma lawmakers passed three critical bills to shore up accountability and access to care.
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Diving deep on core mental health issues
Our 14 publications in 2025 took our stakeholders' understanding further on topics like criminal justice diversion and suicide prevention.
Jump to sectionA trusted partner for communities
Healthy Minds works alongside communities to build their capacity and offer data-driven guidance on projects and programs to improve mental health access. This year, we saw community-led mental health initiatives make important progress across the state, both in large cities like Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Edmond, and in smaller communities implementing opioid abatement strategies.
A roadmap for OKC’s most urgent behavioral health challenges
In 2025, Healthy Minds published a comprehensive assessment of Oklahoma City’s needs around mental health and substance use, which marked milestone for the community toward building a behavioral health system that is designed to meet the full scope of residents’ needs.
Through dozens of interviews and a comprehensive data analysis, we found significant disparities in Oklahoma City’s needs and services. For example, we found a mismatch in Oklahoma City’s need for and access to intensive community-based services, especially for people with serious mental illness.
Healthy Minds has convened three work groups, whose recommendations will inform strategies and next steps for Oklahoma City’s mental health leadership team, a cross-sector group of community leaders dedicated to aligning Oklahoma City’s mental health systems with the needs of the city’s residents.
A better way to respond to mental health crises
In May, Oklahoma City launched its new Mobile Integrated Healthcare program, housed within the Fire Department, to be able to offer an alternative response to mental health crises and avoid sending police and firefighters to calls that could be better handled by a mental health worker. Now, when someone calls 911 in Oklahoma City for a mental health problem, call-takers can dispatch people specially equipped to provide a mental health response: peers, paramedics, clinicians, and care navigators.
Healthy Minds played an advisory role in the launch of this new program, serving as the facilitator of the city’s Crisis Intervention Advisory Group and working alongside the city’s Public Safety Partnership.
Oklahoma City's mental health initiative is supported by:
Guiding opioid abatement strategy statewide
Across Oklahoma and the U.S., opioid settlement dollars are a critical opportunity for communities to undo decades of harms from the opioid epidemic. In work at the state and local levels, Healthy Minds offers guidance and advice on how to best use opioid abatement funds to save lives.
Statewide grant program
Healthy Minds has worked closely with the Office of the Oklahoma Attorney General and the Opioid Abatement Board to maximize the impact of opioid settlement dollars across our state. We both advise the attorney general’s staff on administering a successful grant program, and work directly with communities to support their successful grant applications.
In 2025, our second year working with the office on opioid abatement, we developed eight priority strategies for opioid abatement in Oklahoma to simplify how communities choose and deploy evidence-based programs that meaningfully address and prevent opioid and other substance use problems.
Tulsa County’s opioid abatement strategy
In 2025, the Tulsa County Board of County Commissioners hired Healthy Minds to assess the impact of the opioid epidemic on the county as it prepared to distribute grants from its pool of funding from opioid lawsuit settlements. Tulsa County used the assessment’s findings as a guide in choosing high-impact, evidence-based projects, ultimately giving out $4.5 million in awards across 16 organizations.
Opioid abatement in the city of Tulsa
Healthy Minds supports the City of Tulsa’s opioid abatement program both as an evaluator and by hosting regular overdose prevention learning communities. This year, Healthy Minds brought together dozens of Tulsans — first responders, city employees from a variety of departments, as well as people who work in community mental health and other social services — to learn about harm reduction and their roles in preventing overdose.
‘No wrong door’ for Tulsans in mental health crisis
The City of Tulsa has spent years developing its robust crisis system, but data showed a missing piece. Despite mental health crisis lines like 988 and the COPES crisis line, thousands of Tulsans still called 911 every year for mental health emergencies.
Healthy Minds worked with the Tulsa First Responders Advisory Council to launch a call diversion program that embeds clinicians from Family and Children’s Services at the city’s 911 call center. When someone calls 911 in a mental health emergency, clinicians can often connect a person with the help they need entirely over the phone, without requiring a police or fire response.
Since the call diversion program launched in February 2025, mental health clinicians have diverted over 6,100 calls away from first responders, consequently saving the Tulsa police department, fire department, and EMSA over $380,000. In doing so, the program also keeps people out of emergency rooms and jails when they can be better served with mental health resources in the community.
Steadiness in the face of major changes
2025 brought sweeping changes to how mental health is funded at the state and federal levels, with major cuts to Medicaid and concern over finances at Oklahoma’s mental health department. We kept our partners informed on the impact of these changes, advocated for essential services, and offered guidance on the path forward.
Focus on the community mental health system
The Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services — and by extension, the community mental health system as a whole — faced intense scrutiny from lawmakers during the 2025 legislative session.
At this critical moment, Healthy Minds focused our research and analysis on how to ensure good governance and financial accountability for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, or CCBHCs. These clinics have significantly increased access to mental health services across Oklahoma and now play integral roles in how communities address local mental health needs, often partnering with schools, law enforcement, and social services.
But to achieve the full cost and service benefits of the CCBHC model, Oklahoma needs a strong, capable mental health department, with more capacity to manage and assess data and provide effective oversight. Our analysis lays out how Oklahoma can reach that goal.
Federal funding for mental health
Quantifying the impact of SAMHSA grants
Community mental health providers, tribes, school districts, and state and local governments rely on grants from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to serve vulnerable Oklahomans and make critical improvements in the state’s ability to prevent substance use and respond to mental health crises.
When the federal administration announced SAMHSA would be consolidated with several other health-related agencies, Healthy Minds analyzed how SAMHSA grant funding has been directed to Oklahoma entities, what the state stood to lose if grants were clawed back, and where any potential cuts would be felt most acutely.
Understanding cuts to Medicaid
Nationally, Medicaid is the single largest payer for behavioral health services, with nearly 20% of Medicaid enrollees living with a behavioral health diagnosis. In 2025, H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, made dramatic changes to how Medicaid will work in the coming years.
Once the bill was signed into law, we moved quickly to quantify the major impacts the law will have on our state and the more than 1 million Oklahomans enrolled in SoonerCare, Oklahoma’s Medicaid program. Our analysis laid out the stakes for rural hospitals and explained how new work requirements could affect working Oklahomans on Medicaid by introducing new administrative hurdles.
Diving deep on core mental health issues
In 2025, Healthy Minds’ research and analysis advanced Oklahoma decisionmakers’ understanding of core mental health and substance use challenges. We delved deeply into issues including suicide risk factors and prevention, how the mental health and criminal justice systems intersect, and where our behavioral health workforce struggles to meet Oklahomans’ needs. Already, we are working to advance policy solutions to the challenges we uncovered through our research.
Findings from a decade’s worth of suicide data
For nearly two decades, Oklahoma has had a higher suicide rate than the national average — often among the top 10 highest in the country. Oklahoma stakeholders knew this, but to push suicide prevention efforts further, Healthy Minds set out to answer two major questions: who dies by suicide in Oklahoma, and what can we do to prevent these deaths?
The resulting report was one of the most comprehensive examinations of suicide published in Oklahoma, shedding light on the complex social and environmental factors that lead to suicide. Among our findings were:
- Over half of people who died by suicide in Oklahoma from 2013 to 2022 had a mental health or substance use disorder or both, but only about a quarter were in treatment at the time of their death.
- About a third of people who died by suicide had a problem with an intimate partner that appeared to contribute to their death, and about 1 in 5 had a physical health problem that appeared to contribute to their death.
- Oklahoma children and youth have lower suicide rates compared to adults, but have much higher rates of suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts.
These findings show missed opportunities for intervention and will drive suicide prevention policy efforts in the years to come, including a 2026 bill to require at least annual mental health screenings in routine primary care appointments.
Illuminating next steps for criminal justice diversion
When Oklahomans cannot access the mental health support they need, they are often funneled into the criminal legal system, where they suffer worse outcomes at a much higher cost to society than if they had been treated in the community.
In an in-depth analysis, Healthy Minds examined the capacity of systems to divert and deflect people with mental health and substance use challenges away from the criminal legal system and into treatment.
We found significant cost savings still on the table in Oklahoma: for example, a $24 million investment in expanding treatment courts to meet demand for these programs would generate $111 million in savings, for a net savings of $87 million. Equipped with these findings, Healthy Minds then spent much of 2025 understanding the challenges local law enforcement and district attorneys face in implementing stronger diversion practices — and we are working now toward solving these challenges through policy change.
Solutions to Oklahoma’s behavioral health workforce challenges
One of Healthy Minds’ top priorities is finding ways to grow Oklahoma’s behavioral health workforce now and ensure the state has a robust workforce in the years to come. In 2025, our research focused on part of the workforce that can be overlooked: allied mental health professionals, such as peers, case managers, and community health workers.
When allied mental health workers can work at their full potential — that is, when their daily responsibilities reflect their unique skills and training — they have the potential to extend the reach of licensed behavioral health clinicians. But we found that low wages and restrictive certification requirements hinder communities’ ability to hire and keep these employees.
As a result of this research, one of our 2026 legislative priorities would expand employment opportunities for peers and case managers, which would allow them to serve important roles in courts and fire departments, for example.
Investing in long-term impact
Transforming Oklahoma's approach to mental health takes sustained effort and resources. Partnerships with foundations, grant-making organizations, and other philanthropic funders enable Healthy Minds to address long-standing issues and emerging opportunities.
