Fare Well

 After 7+ years as President and CEO of Mental Health America, I retired on June 30, 2021.

During that time, MHA accomplished a lot. It changed the ways we think about mental health and mental illness.

We introduced our MHA screening program. It became the most successful early identification program ever, especially for children. Today, 10 million people have completed a free, anonymous screening with MHA and received targeted follow-up resources for their mental health. This number will grow by millions each year.

We created our B4Stage4 messaging frame.

Arguing that mental health conditions were the only chronic diseases that as a matter of public policy we waited until Stage 4 to treat, and then often inappropriately only through incarceration, we said we needed to act before Stage 4.

Local, national, and international partners helped us advance this frame and change the way we approach and treat serious mental health conditions – because all mental health conditions should be treated seriously.

We created a new focus on children’s mental health in our policy and media work. We put greater focus on workplace mental health through our Bell Seal program, which recognizes employers of any size for their commitment to mental health. We built our affiliate and associate network.

And we built partnerships promoting mental health with both traditional corporate partners in the health space and entities as diverse as Riot Games, the National Football League, Burger King, Netflix, and Hot Topic.  

Our collaborative work during 2020 with thirteen other major nonprofit organizations led to a unified vision – now endorsed by dozens of others – that lays out the essential pillars of a reformed and fully fleshed out system of mental health services and supports.

It is no secret that our existing mental health system has failed a lot of people during the half century. And while we have scaled some mountains these past few years, we have many more to go.

Climbing mountains can seem like a daunting, exhausting task. But as Muhammad Ali, paraphrasing an old quote, said, “it isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.”

Our progress has been impeded so many times by pebbles in our shoes – fractured constituencies, our own narrow perspectives and experiences, differences in pathways toward the same goal, even burdens of daily living. What I hope MHA’s recent successes have taught us is that sometimes, all we need to do to make progress is to remove the pebbles.

Clearly, I am proud of MHA’s accomplishments. And I will always take pride in my role in advancing the mental health advocacy field.

But I have also had my share of sadness and grief during these past seven years – my own pebbles in my shoe. I lost two adult children to illness – my daughter Larissa to cancer and my son Tim to schizophrenia.

So many of our sons and daughters have been taken from us. So many have been lost to illness and injury. So many others have been lost to bigotry, racism, and discriminatory policies and practices that advanced misery and suffering.

I say this because I am certain that in my 45 years of professional life, I sometimes had a hand in advancing misery. I may not have ever intended that. But no one can foresee the long-term consequences of every decision they make.

What we can do is learn from our decisions, our lived experiences, and the lived experiences of the people we remember.

From Larissa, I have learned to live – to shine and thrive (as she would put it) and find joy within pain.

From Tim, I learned to be patient with those who do not understand how to help. So long as they try, every mistake can be forgiven – as Tim forgave every mistake we made before he died.

Recently, I have tried to share these insights with others.

I wish the lessons of my professional life were more profound. I wish I had changed more of the world. I wish that I had influenced every life for the better.

And I wish that I had always understood just how profoundly important our mental health is to us all.

But I am satisfied that I have done my part and it is time for me to step back and let others lead in this mission. There are so many talented and compassionate people who will do that. I say to them in advance, thank you.

Take care, be well, stay safe, and always hope.

Paul Gionfriddo was a state legislator, mayor, nonprofit leader, and President and CEO of Mental Health America from 2014 until 2021. He is author of Losing Tim: How Our Health and Education Systems Failed My Son with Schizophrenia (Columbia University Press, 2014). He can be reached at gionfriddopaul@gmail.com.