Less than 2% of philanthropic giving in the United States goes toward mental health.

Liza Green of the UBS Optimus Foundation named that number from the stage at the 2026 JED Foundation Gala, and our team has carried it around since. “Mental health is one of the defining challenges of our time,” she said. “Funding remains fragmented and insufficient. We will not solve this crisis through fragmented efforts.”

An answer to that fragmentation shared the same evening. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and The Jed Foundation announced their intent to join forces and become one organization AFSP/JED, the largest nonprofit in the country dedicated to suicide prevention across the lifespan. Pending approval from the New York State Attorney General, the two organizations expect to close in Fall 2026, joining a $75 million operating budget and a national chapter network of 56,000 volunteer advocates with JED’s partnerships across close to 1,500 schools and community organizations.

Phil Satow, who started JED with his wife Donna after losing their son Jed to suicide, described the combined organizations as a multi-lane highway, more ways for more people to reach help. He asked everyone listening to “work together to take advantage of this rare opportunity to support, help, and protect millions throughout the life cycle.”

Sector watchers read an announcement like this as consolidation news. Families will feel it as more care, more hope.

Demand has outgrown the system

For the first time in U.S. history, behavioral health visits have passed primary care visits among people with commercial insurance. Americans made 66.4 million behavioral health visits in a year, a 44% rise since 2018, while primary care visits fell 7%.

Capacity did not move with the demand. For example, more than four in five people who need substance use treatment receive none, held back by provider shortages and thin infrastructure.

Many people also live with more than one mental health challenge at a time. A third of adults living with a mental illness also live with a substance use disorder, and among people living with serious mental illness that figure reaches 50%. Someone who has to tell the same story at three agencies that do not share records stops telling it.

What a merger frees up

Hospital and healthcare mergers cut operating costs 15% to 30% through economies of scale, according to the National Council on Compensation Insurance. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Health Economics have found that consolidation lifts performance at clinics that were struggling. Nonprofits have no shareholders waiting on those savings, so boards route them back into services: sliding-scale fees, crisis teams staffed at 2 a.m.

Grant competition eats the rest. Two neighborhood organizations chasing the same county dollars spend hundreds of staff hours writing against each other, and one of them loses. A combined organization files one application for a larger multi-year block and puts the hours it saved into care.

The rest of the field has noticed. PwC reported behavioral health mergers rising through 2025, and Scope Research counted 196 transactions that year, up from 178 in 2024 and the most active year since 2022. Kevin Taggart, who tracks this market, expects buyers in 2026 to pay a premium for organizations with strong clinical quality.

Florida offers a close look at what that buys. Gracepoint Wellness and Cove Behavioral Health merged in 2025 to form Ibis Healthcare, moving crisis stabilization and substance use care onto a single electronic medical record so a person doesn’t fall through the cracks when transitioning from various levels of care.  Their pooled budget opened Florida’s first women-only behavioral health hospital in 2026, a project neither could have funded alone. Brightli and Centerstone closed their own merger of equals in November 2025, keeping community clinics out of the hands of out-of-state for-profit buyers and giving small local providers access to telehealth and research infrastructure they could not have built on their own.

Connection over competition

Flawless has worked in this field for decades and has seen most versions of the behavioral health system. We started in Oregon, where we watched good people work in isolation, competing for money too thin to cover many of their programs. Palm Beach County changed what we expect. Local leaders and large institutions here build with each other, and the collaborative approach is palpable. 

AFSP and JED are pointing the same direction at a national scale. Two organizations that could have kept building parallel programs chose one door instead. Providers who choose connection over competition save lives. The families waiting on the other end of a phone line will feel that before anyone publishes a study about it.

If you or someone you know needs to talk to someone right now, call, text, or chat 988 for a free, confidential conversation with a trained counselor, available 24/7.

To learn more about the combined organization, visit afsp.org and jedfoundation.org.