https://youtu.be/9X61Vb_eOC0

What They’re Watching: Quianta Moore, MD, Hackett Center for Mental Health

By

Eli Kirshbaum

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Through her work at the Hackett Center for Mental Health—housed within the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute—the center’s Executive Director Quianta Moore, MD, focuses on ensuring that state mental health policy is reflective of the mental health needs in local communities. There is often a disconnect between state-level policy and the mental health experiences of communities on the ground, she says. This goal is encapsulated by her organization’s motto: “Putting policy into practice.”

She said an important part of the conversation about bridging siloes in Texas mental health policy is to give equal consideration to the regions of the state are doing well in terms of mental health. Not only should the state examine areas where mental health is waning to identify areas of improvement, but it should also examine where the state is having success in supporting mental health needs.

“What about the communities who seem to be resilient? What about all the folks who are not in mental health crisis? And how do we learn from those communities about resilience around collective efficacy and pro-social behavior, and communities really having this connectiveness? It seems, according to my research and the literature, that [this] really mitigates against having youth going into mental health crisis.

So we try to take those learnings and then inform policy makers around, how do we build up the things that we know work well, while simultaneously trying to fix the things that we know don’t work so well?”