Governor Gavin Newsom used California’s youth mental-health crisis to build a sprawling therapeutic bureaucracy rooted in the idea that white supremacy was driving children’s distress—and committed billions in taxpayer dollars to it.
Beginning in 2021, the Newsom administration justified a major overhaul of the state’s youth mental-health system by invoking “an escalating behavioral health crisis” marked by “severe outcomes,” including a dramatic increase in hospital visits for self-harm and suicide during the Covid pandemic. California was failing the children in greatest need, leaving them boarding in emergency rooms, traveling hundreds of miles for treatment, and cycling through short-term programs that failed to stabilize them. And this remains the case today.
But the system that Newsom’s effort has built over the past five years, with heavy input from progressive activists, did not focus primarily on those breakdowns in care. Instead, the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) was organized around “behavioral health,” a legitimate term encompassing mental illness and substance abuse, but broad enough for activists to exploit in service of a statewide equity agenda. The effort centered on “prevention”—the screening, surveillance, and medicalization of children who were not the ones driving the crisis in the first place.
Created through the 2021 Budget Act, the CYBHI was a five-year, multidepartment project with an initial $4.7 billion price tag and a mandate to “reimagine and transform” the behavioral-health system. It became the centerpiece of Governor Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health. As part of a buildout costing more than $15 billion, the state turned schools into sites of mental-health service delivery, expanded Medi-Cal to reimburse social services, and offered grants for “community-defined” practices in place of evidence-based ones, making programs centered on progressive activism and “gender-affirming” services eligible for public funding.