The country is short roughly 250,000 behavioral health workers, and the gap keeps widening. For the health departments CredibleMind works with, that number shows up as a resident who waits months for an appointment an hour away, in a county that may have no therapist at all.

Prevention and early intervention, the tools public health already owns, are how communities meet demand that clinical care alone can’t.

We make that case with NACCHO every year. At this year’s NACCHO360 Behavioral Health 360° session, three public health leaders from New York, Nebraska, and Indiana joined us to show the room what our partnership looks like in practice. 

Prevention is public health’s job now

Our co-founder and CEO Deryk Van Brunt, a health informatics researcher and faculty member at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, told the room that the provider shortage could climb to 400,000 in the near future. People are carrying political, economic, environmental, and social stress at once, a polycrisis that keeps anxiety and depression rates high.

“We can’t clinically treat our way out of this,” Van Brunt said. 

There aren’t enough providers to hire, and in rural counties they often don’t exist. Public health is where communities turn. Paul Pettit, public health director for Genesee and Orleans Counties in New York and a NACCHO board member, described health departments “stepping into the void” where there’s no clinic and no clinician.

Most people in distress want self-help first

When someone is struggling, they may not always be looking for a therapist. 

“Three out of four just want to know what they can do to feel better,” Van Brunt said. 

The other one in four want clinical care. Most communities route everyone toward that smaller group, toward the services that cost the most and take the longest to reach.

Behavioral Health 360° starts from what most people want. The program provides a county or coalition with a community-branded site that contains more than 100 topic centers, over 20,000 clinician-vetted resources, and validated self-assessments for common conditions like anxiety and depression. The assessments route each person by risk level, toward self-care or toward clinical and local services, so the whole community has one front door.

People self-select to the right level of care

Platform-wide, people’s choices track their screening results. Among lower-risk residents, 77% choose self-care; among those at higher risk, 71% move on to professional or local care. Across the platform, 94% gave a thumbs up to the resource they selected, and 57% reported a positive change, like sleeping better or drinking less.

“We’re seeing people self-select to the right level of care,” Van Brunt said. “Technology is no panacea, but it’s a very inexpensive way of reaching a very large number of people once you’ve got the formula set up.”

Monterey County’s results held up to independent review

As supplemental evidence, Van Brunt highlighted Monterey County, California as a case that put the model to an outside test. Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Health Research for Action evaluated the county’s WellScreen tool, built on the CredibleMind platform, over a full year. In the year after launch, nearly 29,000 residents used the platform, more than double the clients served the prior fiscal year, and completed over 6,000 screening assessments. The evaluators found higher percentages of people of color using the system and a shift toward more Medi-Cal recipients, the residents the county had struggled to reach.

Van Brunt echoed the results: the county tripled the number of people accessing behavioral health support, reached more youth, Spanish speakers, and high-risk residents, and saw overall system costs decline.

Engagement depends on the work around the platform

Behavioral Health 360° doesn’t move people on its own. The communities seeing the most use integrate the program into places residents already go. Van Brunt said communities in the bottom quartile reach 4% of their population in a year, while those in the top quartile reach 12%, and about two-thirds of visitors do something meaningful once they arrive. Entry points look like:

• A QR code on the back of a high school ID
• A resource card handed over with a death certificate
• Materials passed to families through justice diversion programs

Three communities showed what that work looks like:

• • Genesee and Orleans Counties, New York.  The program was funded with opioid settlement dollars and opened it to everyone. “With individual care, individuals are getting the help,” Pettit said. “But this platform allows every single one of our residents to have access to mental health and wellness programming. All of our residents, 100,000 plus or so, get to tap into that whenever they want.” Pettit also read a letter from a resident of a neighboring county on the platform: “Living in a rural community can sometimes make accessing support difficult, but CredibleMind helped me find reliable resources right from home. It was the first step in improving my overall wellbeing.”
  • Douglas County, Nebraska. “Think outside of the box on partnerships,” said Leah Casanave, Division Chief of Community Health, Nutrition and Clinical Services for the Douglas County Health Department. Her team came to the platform knowing its limits: the county health assessment kept flagging mental health, “while also recognizing that we aren’t behavioral health experts,” she said. The health department co-brands with a neighboring county, puts its logo on coasters and fidget spinners, and tailors content to local moments like severe weather. To reach men, it partnered with Omaha’s professional and college sports teams. 
  • Columbus, Indiana. Julie Orben, action team specialist for Mental Health Matters at Columbus Regional Health, built the Mental Health Matters coalition and trained ambassadors to talk openly about their own mental health. She framed the problem from her own experience: “I feel very comfortable coming in and telling you, ‘I’m going to be late because I’m going to get my annual mammogram,’” Orben said. “I don’t feel as comfortable saying… ‘I’m going to go see my therapist.’” Her design rule: “The process would fit for the human in the center,” she said. When a change in state law ended the sheriff’s commissary funding that had covered three years, with the money running out in April 2027, the coalition replaced it with an opioid settlement grant and other gifts.

• Mental Health Matters: By the Numbers:
  • Reached more than 342,000 residents with 1.1 million impressions through digital campaigns.
  • Generated 7,026 clicks to full-length lived-experience stories and CredibleMind resource pages.
  • Achieved a 97.5% empathy lift, with nearly all survey respondents reporting increased compassion after viewing stories.
  • Extended bilingual outreach to more than 104,000 Spanish-speaking residents.
  • Increased community engagement; monthly newsletters consistently exceed a 50% open rate.

•  What the Best Do Better: The best practices driving engagement and positive outcomes center on teamwork, cohesion, and consistency. Here are five best practices: 
  • Build a broad coalition
  • Have a strong champion
  • Use local digital advertising
  • Tap into multiple channels of reach
  • Keep the message fresh and frequent

What we’re building next

CredibleMind helps public health teams strengthen community mental health upstream, engaging residents earlier with evidence-based support that’s simple to deploy, even with limited resources. It’s an inexpensive way to reach a whole community, available to every resident whenever they need it.

That work keeps evolving with new features that make support simpler and more personalized for residents. Smart Search reads what someone is looking for and points only to vetted and local resources, so the guidance they get is evidence-based rather than whatever a general search returns. Digital Guided Journeys helps residents with rising or co-occurring behavioral health risk get the right support sooner.