May arrives, and the green ribbons come out.
Mental Health Awareness Month has been observed in the United States since 1949 — seventy-seven years of ribbons, 5Ks, and well-meaning campaigns. The campaign was launched by Mental Health America (then the National Association for Mental Health), originally as a single Mental Health Week in May co-organized with the Jaycees, and was eventually expanded to the full month. The stigma has genuinely softened over those seven decades. More people talk openly about therapy, medication, and their own experiences than at any point in American history.
And yet.
Access has not kept pace with awareness. The most recent SAMHSA National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released in July 2025, found that 61.5 million American adults — 23.4% of the adult population — experienced any mental illness in 2024, and 14.6 million experienced serious mental illness. Of those 61.5 million adults, 47.9% received no mental health treatment in the past year. Awareness reached them. Access did not.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, we want to do something more useful than change avatars. Here is what awareness actually needs to become, and where Southern Oregon stands.
The difference between awareness and access
Awareness says: mental health matters. Access says: here is how you get support this week.
These are not the same thing. A person can be completely aware that they need therapy and still wait six months for a first appointment. A teenager can know exactly that they are struggling and still have no adult willing to help them find care. A veteran can have full VA benefits and still drive forty minutes to an overbooked clinic.
The numbers on access are stark. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders Reports analyzed psychiatric appointment availability across the United States and found that only 18.5% of psychiatrists were currently accepting new patients, with median wait times of 67 days for in-person appointments and 43 days for telepsychiatry. A separate analysis cited by the American Psychological Association in 2023 reported mean wait times across all behavioral health providers approaching 94 days. Federal guidelines from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services require Medicare Advantage plans to provide non-emergency behavioral health appointments within seven business days. The actual experience of patients is roughly twelve times longer.
The work of this decade is not to create more awareness. It is to shorten the distance between noticing and receiving.
The state of mental health in our region
A few data points that shape how we practice in Jackson County:
- Oregon now ranks 7th in the nation for adult access to mental health care, up from 21st five years ago, according to Mental Health America’s 2025 State of Mental Health in America report. This is a meaningful improvement driven in part by Oregon’s 2023 decision to raise Medicaid reimbursement rates for behavioral health providers by up to 30%, which expanded the in-network provider pool.
- And yet Oregon ranks worst in the nation for the prevalence of mental illness in adults, with approximately 30% of Oregon adults experiencing mental health challenges — the highest rate of any state plus the District of Columbia, per the same MHA report.
- Oregon ranks last in the country for youth mental health, with the highest rate of young people who have experienced a major depressive episode, according to PBS reporting on the same MHA dataset.
- Rural Jackson County continues to face documented provider shortages. The federal Health Resources and Services Administration designates Health Professional Shortage Areas using thresholds of 30,000 residents per psychiatrist or 9,000 residents per core mental health provider. Many areas of Jackson County qualify.
- Insurance remains a major barrier. Even clients with “good” plans frequently discover their in-network options are booked or geographically unreachable.
- LGBTQ+ residents, BIPOC residents, and disabled residents face compounded access barriers — fewer culturally competent providers, more insurance friction, and a higher rate of clinical mis-attunement when they do get in the door. The compounding effect of racism on mental health, in particular, is well documented; we wrote about it specifically in Racism and Mental Health: How Belonging Affects Black Wellbeing.
What that picture means in practice: Oregon has invested heavily and made real progress on the access side, but prevalence has not declined and the wait between recognizing a need and receiving help remains long.
What Mental Health Awareness Month should actually do in 2026
If we’re past the point where awareness alone moves the needle, the question becomes: what does?
Three things, in our clinical experience.
1. Make the path to care concrete, not aspirational
Telling someone “you should see a therapist” without naming what to do next is a kindness that often goes nowhere. The more useful version is: here are three places that take your insurance, here’s the average wait, here’s how to make a sliding-scale request, here’s what to say in the first call. Concrete beats aspirational every time.
If you’ve been putting off finding a therapist because the process feels overwhelming, our guide How to Find a Therapist Who Truly Gets You walks through what to look for, what to ask, and how to gauge fit in the first session.
2. Treat the systemic barriers as systemic, not individual
When 47.9% of adults with mental illness don’t receive treatment, that is not a personal failure of motivation. It is a structural failure of the system that’s supposed to deliver care. Awareness Month is well-suited to push for the systemic fixes: parity enforcement, Medicaid rate adequacy, telehealth permanence, training pipelines for culturally responsive providers, school-based mental health programs.
A sustained 2023 advocacy effort by Oregon’s Behavioral Health Coalition is part of why the state’s MHA access ranking jumped 14 spots. That kind of structural advocacy belongs in May.
3. Center the people most often left out
Mental Health Awareness Month historically centers a fairly narrow image of “mental health” — usually mild-to-moderate anxiety and depression in middle-class adults. This is real, but it’s not the whole picture. Severe and persistent mental illness, the experiences of marginalized communities, perinatal mood disorders, the specific shape mental illness takes in late life, the way trauma shows up in neurodivergent people — these often go missing from the awareness conversation.
We’ve tried to push that conversation outward in pieces like Women’s Mental Health: Beyond “Just Hormones” and What Is Trauma? Beyond the Stereotypes, and we encourage other providers to do the same in May.
What Helping Hand Therapy is doing this Mental Health Awareness Month
Three concrete things, on the access side specifically:
- A sliding-scale review. We’ve widened our income-based fee adjustments through May 31. If finances have been the barrier, this is the month to ask. Email or call us and ask about sliding scale.
- Same-week consultation availability. For new clients reaching out in May, we are protecting consultation slots within seven business days. (This is the federal CMS standard for Medicare Advantage. We think it should be the standard for everyone.)
- Free 15-minute fit calls with any of our clinicians, no strings attached. The wait between deciding to seek help and the first interaction with a therapist is one of the most uncomfortable thresholds. We can lower it.
A note on the systemic picture
Oregon’s improvement from 21st to 7th in MHA’s access ranking is real. We’re not minimizing that. We are saying that the prevalence picture and the youth picture are still bad, and that any honest Mental Health Awareness Month observance in 2026 names both.
If awareness was the project of the twentieth century, access is the project of this one. The clinicians, advocates, and family members of people living with mental illness in Jackson County have been working on this for years. May is the month the rest of the country pays attention. Let’s use it well.
If you want support this month
Our team at Helping Hand Therapy offers trauma-informed, neuro-affirming care across our Central Point and Ashland offices, plus telehealth across Oregon. We work with anxiety, depression, trauma, ADHD, autism in adults, grief, life transitions, and the long shadow of complex trauma. We accept most major insurance and offer sliding-scale options.
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation: www.helpinghandtherapy.net
Offices: Central Point, OR (billing office) | Ashland, OR | Telehealth across Oregon
Crisis resources (please save these — for you or someone you love):
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988
Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): text START to 678-678
Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741
Jackson County Mental Health Crisis Line: 541-774-8201
Helping Hand Therapy LLC | Trauma-informed, neuro-affirming mental health care for Southern Oregon. | Central Point (billing) + Ashland | www.helpinghandtherapy.net
