In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Dr. Sunny Patel, a child psychiatrist who recently served as Senior Advisor at SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and as a White House Fellow, about the current state of children's behavioral health policy. In a political environment where standing behind data and science is becoming a risk, Sunny has bravely spoken out against misinformation and documented the impact of federal cuts on children's behavioral health systems.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Jay Chaudhary, former Director of Mental Health and Addiction for Indiana, about transforming an entire state's behavioral health system. Jay describes the mental health financing system he inherited as "a house of cards built on top of a shell game," where providers were locked into rigid financial formulas that made any deviation potentially catastrophic.

Jay's journey began as a civil rights lawyer launching medical-legal partnerships that placed attorneys directly in healthcare settings to address the social drivers that keep people sick. That experience taught him that clinicians' understanding of their work transforms when they see how much their clients' lives outside the clinic affect them, and more importantly, that "we can do something about it through collaboration."

As state director, Jay discovered that incremental changes were impossible in such a fragile system. His solution was comprehensive: implementing Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) that use cost-based reimbursement, giving providers flexibility to actually respond to community needs. The transformation required not just policy change but alignment across stakeholders, from legislators to law enforcement to providers, all using the same language: "someone to call, someone to respond, somewhere to go."

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel has a conversation with Shawn Hardness, Founder and CEO of Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys in Washington, DC.

Shawn built a school that challenges everything we think we know about supporting students from high-need communities. At Statesman, 90% of students come from families engaged with public support systems, and the school serves three times the typical rate of students needing special education services. Yet these boys are thriving.

At the heart of Statesman's approach is a radical reframing: love and compassion aren't soft additions to "real" interventions. They are the intervention. This isn't about adding more services at the edges while leaving the daily lived experience of children unchanged. It's about building love and trust and relationships into the architecture of every day, protecting it in budgets and schedules with the same fierce commitment schools typically reserve for academic outcomes.