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

The Missing Mental Health Element in the Ferguson Story

By now, everyone has heard the news from Ferguson, Missouri. An unarmed 18 year old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer. Michael Brown was black. Some of the events surrounding the shooting are in dispute. But what isn’t in dispute is that for the past two weeks, a community has been torn apart by race – a community that until recently was best known for its proximity to St. Louis and its designation as a Playful City, USA . Picture credit: Health Affairs Media reports since the August 9 th shooting have focused almost entirely on one angle – race relations. We’ve heard about unrest in the city, the National Guard, police in riot gear, and danger in the streets. We’ve heard about the District Attorney’s ties to law enforcement, and concerns that a too-white Grand Jury may be racially motivated not to indict the police officer involved in the deadly shooting. But the media have been strangely silent about a different angle – this comm

Veterans and Mental Illness

On a sultry June morning in our national’s capital last Friday, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war. Some stopped and took pictures. One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo. Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet. It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall. It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored. Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight. It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight. Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence. I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the late 1970s. I had only vag

Celebrating Larissa Gionfriddo Podermanski Five Years Later

My daughter Larissa died of Metastatic Breast Cancer five years ago, in May of 2018. She had only two wishes at the end. One was that we plant a tree for her. We did - in a Middletown CT city park - and it has grown straight and tall. The other was that she not be forgotten. Larissa's family and friends took pains to reassure that she could not be forgotten. If you were fortunate enough to know Larissa, you would know why. Still, I wondered how I might celebrate her a little more now that some years have passed, while sharing some of her memorable spirit with others (some who knew her and others who did not), while reminding us why she was such an extraordinary woman. In early 2017, Larissa started a blog called Metastatically Speaking, through which she chronicled her life with MBC. Unfortunately - and through no one's fault - her blog disappeared some time after her death. So, if you search for it now, you can't find it. However, I was fortunate enough to see and retain

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