Children in Connecticut who are at a high risk of having a mental illness will be screened for illnesses like anxiety, depression and conduct disorders and connected to support services through newly announced federal funding announced on Tuesday.

The $368,900 in funding for the Rocky Hill-based Connecticut Council of Family Service Agencies, Inc. will allow the state-wide organization to identify and work with nearly 1,000 children ages 5 and up who need mental health care.

The funds “will enable 900 kids to be reached and helped before their mental illness becomes potentially disabling and dangerous,” said Robert Muro, president and CEO of CCFSA.

The grant will be used by the statewide network and its 14 member organizations that provide services ranging from foster care services to debt counseling. It will expand the early intervention and treatment work they do with school-aged children who have an elevated risk of mental illness. Children are flagged as more likely to experience a mental illness when they’re exposed to certain social determinants, said Muro, like poverty, domestic violence in the home, exposure to traumatic or violent events or a lack of access to nutrition or transportation.

“It’s those children who are at risk here in the state of Connecticut,” said Muro. “By screening them, they’ll have a better chance to get the services that they need at an age that’s earlier before it becomes more prominent.”

The network plans to expand its mental healthcare screening practices, increase its staffing, provide increased training for healthcare professionals, make more referrals to mental health services and get ahead of barriers like transportation, insurance and childcare that may otherwise prohibit children and families from getting the help they need.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who announced the funding in Rocky Hill alongside U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy Tuesday morning, said the grant will help usher in a new era of screening and helping kids at the earliest stages of their mental illnesses. Most mental illnesses, he said, can be diagnosed and treated by age 14.

With these funds, more kids in Connecticut “can be screened and identified and treated and helped before they become harmful and potentially dangerous to themselves or others,” he said. “And that is a gift that really is of almost priceless value.”

Improving access to mental healthcare is a mission he and Murphy have been on for years, Blumenthal said. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused increased rates of mental health crises, suicides, homicides and domestic violence in states across the map, the need is more urgent than ever.

Children deserve to have access to care for their illnesses, said the senators, and their families deserve to have help getting them that care at a time when many mental healthcare professionals are overwhelmed and may be harder to connect with for initial appointments than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They deserve it, just like you would take preventative steps to identify any other illness at an early stage before it becomes more serious, before the consequences are dangerous and potentially even deadly,” said Blumenthal.

Murphy said allocating for the funding in the federal budget “was a no brainer.”

“Reinvesting in kids right now, while we are still in the middle of a pandemic that has really been damaging to our kids and our students, just made an enormous amount of sense and we are glad to be able to deliver this funding,” he said.

“We’ve seen an explosion in the number of kids in mental health crisis during the pandemic,” said Murphy, pointing to a stark 50 percent increase in reported suicide attempts by teenage girls in 2021.

Murphy said that hospitals statewide will say they have never seen the numbers of children showing up in crisis than they have in the last two years.

“That’s a stunning and heartbreaking number and it tells you how many kids are out there living in crisis,” he said.

Investing in children’s mental healthcare, said Muro, will also help improve their physical health by improving their overall wellbeing from a young age and help prevent their mental illnesses from getting any worse.

The purpose of this grant, said Blumenthal, is to recognize mental illness in the same way broken bones or cancer are recognized as illnesses and injuries that need treatment and to catch them and treat them upstream — or early on — “before they have really bad consequences downstream.”

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Sen. Blumenthal on Tuesday also announced $461,000 in federal funding for United Services Inc., a non-profit community behavioral health center for 21 towns in northeastern Connecticut that is based in Killingly.

The funding will help the center integrate primary care services for physical healthcare within their behavioral health offerings at outpatient clinics, according to the senator’s office.

United Services, Inc. served more than 3,500 people last year, running more than 30 programs like outpatient mental healthcare for adults, children and families, crisis services, domestic violence programs and substance abuse treatment.

Murphy and Blumenthal, who have been speaking out frequently over the past week to call for stricter gun laws to be passed in the United States Senate following the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, said that improving mental health measures is a part of tackling the issue of mass shootings, but that common sense gun legislation is the key.

Restricting access to automatic weapons for people who are having homicidal or suicidal thoughts as a result of a mental illness or mental healthcare crisis is the most effective approach to limiting the growing number of mass shootings taking palace across the United States, the senators said.

Mental health care can help in the holistic approach to reducing the number of shootings, but should, overall, be improved to help children, parents and families struggling with mental health care concerns in every town across the state, the senators said.

“Walk into any emergency room in the state and you will see the scope of our mental health crisis and our crisis of lack of access,” said Murphy on Tuesday. “We should fix our broken mental health system because it’s the right thing to do for parents and children and families. Period. Stop.”