Summing It Up - Timothy Gionfriddo Earned Our Love and Respect

From time to time, I take a look at this blog - a collection of nearly 200 essays now aging in place - because I want to remind myself about how I thought about health policy broadly and the health and mental health policy issues that were hotly debated around the time the Affordable Care Act was being crafted and implemented.

I think about how my own narrative and the narratives of my family members were affected by policy decisions made by others.

There are plenty of commentators and scholars who know a whole lot more about this stuff than I ever did. So, most of my blogs have no historical significance at all - although one may someday.

It includes my first written expression of the "Before Stage 4" concept that became a hashtag (#B4Stage4) and the messaging frame for the work of Mental Health America beginning in 2014, a frame that was widely embraced by the mental health advocacy world.

I posted only a handful of new blogs here while I was the position as President and CEO of Mental Health America. I migrated most of my writing to MHA's blog after 2014.

But I am still proud of this blog, because it gave me the freedom to write about pretty much any health issue I wanted, covering a pretty broad landscape.

And when I visited the site recently, I noticed something else. Ultimately, it gave me the opportunity to express myself personally in a longer form than social media gives us.

The next-to-last blog I posted was about my daughter, Larissa, who had died from metastatic breast cancer. She faced that adversity with charm, humor, dedication, and determination the shine and thrive, as she put it, while she fought to live. And my blog let me eulogize her in a way that still brings her to life for those who did not have the privilege of knowing her.

The last blog I posted was about my son, Tim, and one of my efforts to visit him in San Francisco - a lost opportunity to share some time together because of the true insanity of our mental health service delivery system. We all lost Tim - and so many like him - a long time ago when we decided that mental health issues would be treated as public safety problems, not health matters.

I also had the sad, sad experience of losing Tim again in January when he died in San Francisco - a city he loved - at the age of 35.

During Tim's brief life, he earned our respect. He earned the right to choose his own recovery narrative. He earned our love, although he should not have had to. He was entitled by birth to these things.

So many people saw through his illness to his kindness. They saw through his daily challenges to his passion for living. They saw how much he challenged old ways of thinking simply by being himself, and not some tired media-driven caricature of a young man with a serious mental health condition.

I don't know if I will revive this blog in the days to come. My time at MHA grows short, as I plan to retire soon. But for those few of you who wander by this site and wonder about it, I hope you find something in it that still resonates with you, as I hope the hundreds of thousands who have visited it before you found something of value in it.

--Paul Gionfriddo

Veterans and Mental Illness

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Anxiety and the Presidential Election

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