American Mental Health Foundation
The American Mental Health Foundation is a charitable not-for-profit 501 organization that focuses on providing mental health care.
History
AMHF was organized in 1924 and incorporated in New York State on December 31, 1954. Austrian author Hermann Broch, of Princeton University in the 1940s, was a former chairman of AMHF.Contemporary activities
From 2012 to 2014, AMHF responded to a need, noted by Paul Gionfriddo, for the screening of several thousand youth in a county-wide catchment area. The organization collaborated with Astor Services for Children & Families to identify approximately 15 at-risk individuals who would receive a palliative prevention treatment.In the summer of 2014, AMHF embarked on a research project with Pearson Assessment to measure older individuals within the serious to profound range of intellectual disabilities for behavioral changes. Such a test would be in the mode of the existing Wechsler, Vineland, and Bayley Scales and have wide-ranging applications. The findings of the AMHF 2-year study with Astor Services for Children & Families were made public in April 2016 as Early Identification, Palliative Care, and Prevention of Psychotic Disorders in Children and Youth.
On April 10, 2016, in a letter published by the New York Times, Evander Lomke of AMHF rebutted the medical practice of "growth attenuation" among young people with serious disabilities. In the same month, AMHF issued a monograph describing their two years of collaborative research with Astor Services for Children & Families regarding early signs of schizophrenia and other psychoses, and options for palliation or prevention. On March 27, 2017, Lomke placed an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle on AMHF's behalf, addressing the psychological dimensions of coping with fear, anxiety and social stress, and terrorism.