Building What Was Promised: Two Parent Advisors on Mental Health and What Families Need

Mental health touches every family — not always loudly, but persistently. For Ascend Parent Advisors Stephanie Mitchell Hughes of Columbus, Ohio, and Maria Isabel Ramos Martinez of Modesto, California, that truth is both professional and deeply personal. One leads mental health advocacy at the state level; the other is conducting doctoral research on maternal health and providing therapeutic services to children and families in rural communities. Together, their perspectives reveal something essential: the supports families need already exist in theory. The hard work is making them real.

A System That Was Never Truly Built

Stephanie Mitchell Hughes is the Assistant Executive Director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in Ohio. She speaks plainly about where things stand. “We were supposed to have a community-based system that would reach everyone’s needs,” she says. “That hasn’t happened.”

When mental health hospitals closed decades ago, the promise was that robust, community-level care would take their place. It didn’t — and families are living with that gap. For a parent juggling work and multiple children, a months-long waitlist for a child’s counseling appointment isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a door that simply doesn’t open.

Through NAMI, Stephanie is actively working to close that gap. NAMI’s Ending the Silence program reached over 22,000 middle school students across Ohio between 2022 and 2025, bringing mental health education directly into schools. Programs like NAMI Next Gen are developing the next generation of young advocates. And their 988 warmline connects residents — in non-emergency moments — to real resources through compassionate, direct handoffs to service providers.

But Stephanie is clear that no single organization can fill the structural void. “We need to work collectively — policymakers, families, and people doing the work every day.” Mental health, she argues, shouldn’t be a political football. It’s a community practice, something every level of government and society has a role in sustaining.

Reaching the Families Who Aren’t Yet Reached

Maria Isabel Ramos Martinez brings a different vantage point. As a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a Maternal Health Research Fellow with Morgan State University, she has spent much of her career working in rural California and Texas Rio Grande Valley — and she’s seen firsthand how awareness campaigns can reach professionals on LinkedIn while missing the families who need them most.

“You don’t really hear and see it much in these areas,” she says of rural mental health awareness. “Compared to social media, compared to metropolitan areas where there are more resources.”

The barriers are layered: language, transportation, technology access, and a general invisibility in mainstream outreach. Her solution isn’t to abandon digital tools, but to meet people where they are — in grocery stores, doctors’ offices, community centers, on the radio, and through door-to-door canvassing. She advocates for multilingual flyers with QR codes, pilot-tested with real community members to ensure the materials are truly understood. Jargon, she says, is a wall. “What’s mental health? What does it mean if I go to a therapist?” Those are the questions that need answering before anything else.

For families where transportation makes in-person care impossible, Maria also notes that online platforms like BetterHelp and Grow Therapy are increasingly expanding access by accepting insurance — a meaningful shift in reducing one more barrier between families and support.

What Gives Them Hope

Despite the very real gaps, both women focus on hope — and their hope is grounded, not abstract.

For Stephanie, it lives in the daily reality of recovery. “We start with hope and end with hope,” she says of NAMI’s culture. “Recovery happens every single day.” She sees it in the families they walk alongside, in the young people who are ready to demand something better, and in the conversations that policymakers are increasingly willing to have.

For Maria, hope shows up in a changing tide of demand. “I’m seeing more people wanting mental health services and they are not waiting until it is the worst case scenario.” Stigma, she says, is decreasing. The field is becoming more diverse, with more practitioners who reflect the communities they serve and speak the languages families actually use.

The Work Ahead

What Stephanie and Maria describe, taken together, is a picture of both structural failure and genuine possibility. The system that was promised — community-based, accessible, and adequately resourced — hasn’t arrived. But the people committed to building it are here, working every day.

Reaching families means going to where they are, in the language they speak, with information they can actually use. Sustaining families means building the housing, the services, and the policy infrastructure that makes recovery not just possible but supported. And it means doing all of this together — families, advocates, researchers, and policymakers — without waiting for a perfect system to materialize on its own.

As Stephanie puts it: “Mental health impacts everyone, even if indirectly.” Now is the time to build the system families were always supposed to have.

Stephanie Mitchell Hughes is an Ascend Parent Advisor and Assistant Executive Director for NAMI in Columbus, Ohio. Maria Isabel Ramos Martinez is an Ascend Parent Advisor, clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and Maternal Health Research Fellow with Morgan State University.