Rep. Ruth Balser reflects on her career

Following her announcement that she will retire from the state legislature at the end of this year, Rep. Ruth Balser spoke with Fig City News about her career. A member of House Speaker Ron Mariano’s leadership team, Rep. Balser is the first psychologist elected to the Massachusetts Legislature and has used her training and experience to promote important mental health initiatives. 

Her life has been a continuum of civic and social engagement. “I’ve always valued people’s personal stories and journeys,” she said. Prior to her election to the House, she served eight years as Newton’s Ward 8 Ward Alderman and was in practice as a clinical psychologist.

Her journey began in Queens, New York. The daughter of two educators and born after World War II into a Jewish family deeply motivated to social justice in the wake of the Holocaust, Rep. Balser participated in a range of civil rights activities, first in high school in New York City and later at the University of Rochester. 

After graduating from college and before beginning her doctoral program in clinical psychology, Rep. Balser worked at Cambridge Hospital as a mental health worker for two years in the inpatient psychiatric unit and two years in the psychiatry outpatient clinic. Concurrent with her doctoral program at New York University, she worked at the Greater Lawrence Mental Health Center and then as clinical director of the Newton-Needham-Weston-Wellesley Multi-Service Center. As Dr. Balser, she set up private practice in Brookline and later worked for a behavioral health managed care company. All of her clinical experience would serve as the foundation for her leadership in developing significant mental-health legislation as a state representative.

Serving on Newton Board of Aldermen has been an entry point to the state legislature, as illustrated by State Senator Cynthia Creem, former State Senator Lois Pines, and former Mayor David B. Cohen — who immediately preceded Balser in the State House. Balser, the mother of two young sons, became involved in local politics when concerned about the speed with which cars drove on Newton streets. Through her activism, she attracted Ward 8 support and served for four terms as a Newton alderman, during which she pushed for the installation of STOP signs all over Newton. She once noted that in the 1960s she had carried “Stop the War” signs, and in the 1990s she was putting STOP signs all over the city.

Rep. Balser’s accomplishments in the State House include:

• Expansion of mental health parity in insurance coverage, requiring insurance companies to offer equal coverage for psychological treatment as they do for physical ailments;
• Gender equity in insurance premiums, ending the days when women were charged higher insurance rates than men for disability insurance and annuity policies;
• An omnibus children’s mental health bill;
• Legislation requiring nursing homes to track and report Covid data available to the public during Covid, because nursing homes patients were dying at much greater rates than other segments of the population;
• Fire safety legislation, filed in the aftermath of the tragic fire in what is now Wegman’s plaza in Newton, to expand requirements for the installation of sprinklers in public buildings;
• Public Lands Preservation Act, signed into law in 2022, after more than two decades of her advocacy, to protect and preserve Massachusetts’ public open space; and
• Grants to protect Hammond Pond, Hemlock Gorge, the Charles River Reservation, and Crystal Lake.

Now she is pushing for a bill — Section 35 — that would direct men who have been involuntarily committed because of drug and alcohol abuse — but who have not been charged with any crime — to be directed to a non-criminal treatment facility run by the Department of Public Health or the Department of Mental Health. Currently, men who have been civilly committed may be sent to a prison facility, while women are sent instead to treatment facilities. 

Many of these bills that have become laws have required a decade or two of her constant coalition building and negotiation. In addition to her ongoing efforts to pass Section 35, Rep. Balser is also determined to pass a library bill guaranteeing that companies producing electronic material do not charge libraries more than they charge individual customers and that libraries have full access to such materials. Moreover, the bill authorizes libraries to adopt the same rules for borrowing and using electronic material as they do for books and articles.

Although her State House career will come to an end on December 31, 2024, Rep. Balser will continue to work for the remaining months of her thirteenth term with the commitment and determination that have marked her thirty-four years in public service. She has assured her constituents, colleagues, and friends that she is in perfectly good health and ready to embark on the next phase of her life.