Patrick Kennedy

But we have to have the mission.

That has to be what brings us to this space.

Because if we have the mission, all of this will work out.

If we start to micromanage this, we're going to lose the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is none of us wants the current system.

The current system isn't serving people with serious mental illness and people with all kinds of mental health challenges.

Well, I think that this does affect every single person in this country.

There isn't a family that can't tell a story about how it's impacted them.

It's incredibly personal and painful in my own family to think about the numerous ways that my mom's alcoholism and depression affected all of us, and my dad's post-traumatic stress and drinking affected all of us.

And, you know, what really affected us was the shame that came from them suffering in these ways.

My grandmother on my mom's side died alone as someone with alcoholism.

She was divorced from my grandfather.

No one spoke to her.

She was isolated.

And that's because shame did that.

If we had intervened earlier in all of these illnesses, if we can treat it in a normalized way so that everyone expects to get the questionnaire like they do for stroke and cancer and everything else, you know, what's your family history?

What's your risk, in other words?

then we know how to triage people and risk them so that doctors will know how to better treat those people.

We've talked about an epidemic of opioids, but there's a whole slew of additional medications that are written that are not good if people have an underlying addiction or a mental illness in many cases.

So the system is not aligned, and we have to do a lot to align the system.