Fighting the Structural Forces Breaking Mental Health Care
- Susie Rigas
- Sep 5
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 9
Mental health providers are not burning out; they are being broken down.
My name is Susie. I have been a licensed provider for over 20 years, and in 2024, when the Change Healthcare data breach occurred, I saw providers coming together like never before. I realized there are about 50,000 providers in the same position as me, trying to survive in a broken system while internalizing failure that is, in fact, engineered by structural forces most of us cannot recognize.
My thought was simple: we need a lobbyist. If we pooled our resources, we could afford one and get some long overdue representation as providers. But, beyond securing a collective voice in the shaping of policy and accountability, we need to come together to educate ourselves and every other stakeholder about these structural forces and harms breaking an already fragile behavioral health system. Now is the time for us to reclaim the soul of our profession.
Welcome the Mental Health Professionals Equity Aliance
The Mental Health Professionals Equity Alliance (MHPEA) was born out of this truth: mental health providers and patients are carrying the weight of a broken system while corporations and non-health care entities rake in billions. The exhaustion, the financial strain, and the erosion of professional integrity are not random or inevitable. They are the outcomes of deliberate design.
Structural harms are not accidents of bureaucracy; they are intentional strategies.
Vertical integration consolidates power, allowing insurers to dominate markets and dictate terms. Predatory contracts embed inequity into the very agreements providers must sign to survive. Algorithmic denials are not glitches but calibrated tools of extraction, engineered to ensure fewer claims are paid. Data itself has been commodified, turned into a resource to be mined and sold rather than safeguarded.
For venture capital and private equity groups, the real value of behavioral health is not in the services we provide or the outcomes we achieve. The value is in the data itself. Behavioral health data is uniquely valuable because of its depth, intimacy, and predictive power. Insurers and corporate platforms are harvesting it to train denial algorithms, to narrow definitions of medical necessity, and to build ever more efficient systems of exclusion. Denial at scale is not a flaw in the system; it is the system. The vast majority of payer revenue is generated from restricting access to care and care denial while holding onto premiums. Every denied session, every narrowed authorization, translates directly into profit.
Those tasked with protecting us have abdicated that responsibility.
Regulators defer to industry power rather than enforce the laws designed to ensure fairness. Parity legislation sits on the books, but without enforcement it remains an empty promise. All of our professional organizations have not only failed to defend providers but have allowed themselves to be compromised by corporate sponsorships, lending legitimacy to value-based care models that deepen the very harms they should be resisting.
Meanwhile, politicians are courted with multimillion-dollar charm offensives designed to keep them ignorant or compliant. Industry leaders blame providers for fraud, accuse us of network inadequacy, and label us as inefficient or resistant to change. These narratives are not only false, they are deliberately constructed to divert attention from the real source of dysfunction. It is insurers themselves who engineer scarcity, who design the very barriers that deny care, and who profit from the crises they create. In this climate, the lived expertise of providers and the needs of patients are not just overlooked. They are actively displaced.
MHPEA exists to name these forces,
to expose the systems undermining our profession, and to build the collective power required to resist them. By uniting providers under one banner, we are creating the infrastructure necessary to push back against exploitation, defend clinical autonomy, and ensure that care is guided by ethics rather than profit.
On Friday, September 26, 2025, MHPEA launches its first Advocacy Bootcamp: Part 1.
This live, FREE four-hour training (9:00 AM to 1:00 PM PDT) offers 4.0 CE hours and equips providers with the skills to turn outrage into strategy. Participants will learn the foundations of advocacy, how to navigate common ethical challenges, and how to deploy data as a tool for systems-level change.
This is not about theory. It is about practice: giving providers the tools to defend their autonomy, their ethics, and their profession. If you are ready to stop carrying the weight of this broken system alone, if you are ready to join others in resisting its harms, then this is where you begin.
In solidarity,
Susie Rigas-Morozowich
MHPEA Co-founder & Board Member