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Press Release

Feb. 24, 2004
Contact: Jeffpatterson@mail.utexas.edu

Hogg Foundation for Mental Health Announces New Directions

The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health has announced a significant restructuring of its mission, goals, and funding priorities in an effort to affect improvements in the quality of mental health services, research, policy and education throughout Texas and the nation.

At an event unveiling the new directions on Feb. 24, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health Executive Director Dr. King Davis said the changes were driven by a desire to address serious contemporary mental health needs while remaining true to the Hogg Family’s intentions when creating the Foundation more than six decades ago.

Davis cited numerous reports—particularly the recent reports from the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health and the U.S. Surgeon’s Report on Mental Health—which describe the U.S. mental health care system as being fragmented, cumbersome, culturally inaccessible, and lacking in evidence-based services.

"At a moment of such serious deficiencies, it is incumbent upon organizations like the Hogg Foundation to revise their priorities and improve their capacities to address the issues confronting mental health in the United States in a clear and effective manner," Davis said.

The Hogg Foundation’s new mission will go beyond the traditional financial support of mental health services by establishing two new priority areas: Mental Health Services Research and Mental Health Policy and Law.

The Services Research Program Area will both internally conduct and provide external grant support to research initiatives that evaluate promising community-based service approaches and clinical models aimed at broadening our understanding of evidence-based mental health services for children and adults.

The Public Policy and Law Program Area will engage in objective policy analysis and consultation on critical and emerging issues involving the structure, financing, and delivery of clinical mental health services, which will be of significant value to policymakers, state agencies, and advocacy groups by providing objective research findings and policy recommendations.

Within these two new programmatic directions, Davis said that the Foundation has chosen some specific priority areas upon which it will focus its attention: families and consumers with severe mental illness or severe emotional disorders; disparities in services for underserved populations; mental health system transformation; academic professional training; transferring scientific research to clinical practice; public education; criminal justice and mental health; the interaction of physical health with mental health; religion and mental illness; and , economics and mental illness

"It is important that the Foundation support innovative programs, services and approaches that show us how to solve the pressing problems that have been so vexing to the mental health system in the United States," Davis said. "I believe that the Hogg Family would welcome our efforts to eliminate the burden of mental illness, stigma, and disparities in access to services in Texas," said Davis.

The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health is an administrative unit of The University of Texas at Austin established by the children of former Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg. For more than sixty years, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health has managed both operating programs and grantmaking activities in support of mental health service and research projects in Texas.