Somewhere in New Jersey tonight, a mother is making a phone call she has spent months working up the courage to make. She has watched her adult child disappear into something she does not fully understand, something that has hollowed out his eyes, upended their home, and stolen the person she raised. She has pushed past her fear. She has pushed past the shame she should never have had to feel in the first place. She has finally decided to ask for help.

Yet, she is told to wait.

This is not an isolated story. It is the story of thousands of New Jersey families. It is the story of adults living with serious mental illness and substance use disorders who navigate each day without adequate support, of parents and siblings and spouses who watch their loved ones struggle while the systems that should be there for them fall short. These families are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for what every person with a chronic health condition deserves: timely access to care.

Families are asking, and too often, no one is answering.

For years, through prosperous budget cycles and difficult ones, adult mental health services have been asked to do more with less. Funding has been diverted. Reimbursement rates have stagnated. Providers have been forced to turn away people in crisis, not because they lack compassion, but because they lack the resources to keep pace with the need. And the families left waiting have carried that burden quietly, often silently, because mental illness and substance use still carry a stigma that makes it harder to speak up and harder to demand what is rightfully theirs.

But, the silence is not the same as absence. The heartache is real. The waiting lists are real. The funerals are real.

We invest in early intervention for children, and we should. Children deserve that investment, and building healthy foundations early is the right public health strategy. Children grow up to be adults. The adolescent who receives support today will one day be a working-age adult, a parent, a member of our communities. A system of care that serves people in childhood but abandons them in adulthood is not a system. It is a starting point with no finish line.

New Jersey has made meaningful commitments to harm reduction, and those commitments have saved lives. But, harm reduction may not be the end of the story. For the family watching a loved one survive an overdose only to be discharged with no treatment plan, no follow-up, and a waiting list where a recovery program should be, survival alone is not enough. These families want their loved ones to have a life. They want treatment. They want hope.

When are adult mental health and substance use going to be the priority?

The proposed FY2027 New Jersey State Budget is a moment of decision. Medicaid behavioral health services for adults are not a line item to be trimmed when other priorities press forward. They are the infrastructure that stands between vulnerable people and crisis. Cuts at the state level, compounded by proposed federal reductions to Medicaid under H.R. 1, don’t just reduce a budget. They close doors on people who have already been told to wait too long.

To New Jersey's legislators, we ask something direct and urgent. Please, sponsor a resolution that affirms adult mental health and substance use treatment as a public health priority in this state. Someone must. The families sitting in waiting rooms, waiting by phones, or grieving losses that proper treatment might have prevented are your constituents. They are watching. They need to know that someone in that building sees them.

Adult mental health and substance use has waited long enough. The people behind that need, real people with families who love them, cannot afford to wait any longer.