Centers for Disease Control and Protection is committed to continuing the fight against mental health disease in 2024.
LISTEN NOW: CDC Director, Dr. Mandy Cohen shares details surrounding suicide prevention strategy in 2024
CDC Director Mandy Cohen recently stopped by Audacy to share details surrounding the agency’s national suicide prevention strategy arriving in March 2024, and shared some other strategies they are focused on to better mental health in the new year.
“If the CDC Mission is to protect health and we see folks dying from mental health disease — that is squarely in the land of CDC to help folks protect their health and be safe,” she said before sharing details about their forthcoming suicide prevention strategy.
“We’ve been working on it for a while because this is a hard and complex issue,” she said of the campaign focused on decreasing the number of deaths by suicide in America. ”It is not something CDC can solve alone, but we can help bring data and the best practices in community-based prevention, making sure that we’re decreasing stigma, that folks are getting crisis services that they need, that they access something like 988.”
In addition to the services and resources the CDC provides, Dr. Cohen says there are some longer-term goals they are working toward to make sure Americans can get the care they need surrounding mental health.
“Access is really important and I think that we’re all recognizing that mental health is part of the whole person's health,” she shared before detailing the two main things she believes need to be improved in our broken healthcare system.
“There’s a couple of things," she says. "One [is] making sure that our primary care doctors are able and trained in mental health. I will say, I’m an internist, I’m a primary care Doc myself [and] there’s not a ton of training on mental health. Tons on preventing diabetes and heart disease, but we need to do better in our own training to make sure that we are expanding those access points so primary care doctors [and] pediatricians have more expertise in handling some of the mental health issues.”
She continued, “Second is how do we work from the time that folks are young on mental health resiliency? Building those skills so you can have strong mental health from the beginning…. We can be reactive and treat it, the other way is how do we get upstream and prevent it?”
To hear more about the CDC’s plan to fight suicide and other deadly mental health diseases in 2024, check out Audacy’s entire conversation with Dr. Cohen above.