Everyone who has a mental illness – or who loves someone with a mental illness – owes a debt of gratitude to Rosalynn Carter.
For more than 47 years, she championed the cause of people with psychiatric disorders, working in front of the cameras and behind the scenes to try to ensure that they were treated no differently than those with other ailments.
I first met Mrs. Carter in 1990, after I moved to Atlanta and began running what was then known as the National Mental Health Association of Georgia.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Yes, she was a Southern lady – soft-spoken, with impeccable manners. But she possessed a will of iron and a sharp intellect. And she was willing to tackle contentious issues.
That was evident even in her choice of causes. When Mrs. Carter adopted the issue in the 1970s, there was nothing fashionable about advocating for mental health. Few people spoke openly about psychiatric disorders. People were often locked in institutions or hidden away at home. One of her greatest accomplishments was bringing mental illness out of the darkness.
Mrs. Carter loved to tell the story of how she got involved.
When Jimmy Carter was running for governor, she crisscrossed the state campaigning for him. Early one morning, as she passed out literature in front a factory, she spoke with an exhausted woman who told her about her daughter, who had a mental illness. The woman worked nights to help cover the costs of her daughter’s medical expenses. She was headed home not to rest, but to care for her child.
Mrs. Carter couldn’t stop thinking about the plight of that woman and others like her she’d met on the campaign trail.
When she realized she was in the same town where her husband would be holding an evening rally, she went to the auditorium to surprise him in the receiving line. He asked what she was doing there, she recalled, and she answered, “I came to ask you what you are going to do about mental health when you are governor.”
He replied, “We’re going to have the best mental health system in the country, and I’m going to put you in charge of it.”
From that moment on, she was a passionate advocate for those with mental illnesses.
When Jimmy Carter became president, she urged him to form a commission on mental health and worked with its members to pass the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980.
That law was gutted during the next administration, but she kept fighting. Notably, she led a national charge for the passage of the Mental Health Parity Act, which required group health insurance plans to cover mental illnesses the same way they covered other diseases.
Through The Carter Center, she organized symposiums that brought together key players in the mental health field to discuss parity and the best way to achieve it. She went to Capitol Hill to encourage recalcitrant congressmen to vote for the bill. She gave public speeches and made private phone calls.
Finally, in 1996, the bill passed. Without the moral weight and convening power she brought to the cause, I’m not sure it would have.
Four years later, Mrs. Carter was instrumental in the creation of the first surgeon general’s report on mental health.
In advance of the report’s release, she hired a pollster to survey the public’s attitudes on the report’s key findings. That’s how we learned that while people didn’t believe that 20 percent of Americans suffer from some form of mental illness, they did believe that 1 in 5 Americans did.
That may make you laugh, but it was crucial. Without her savvy, we might not have known the most effective way to present the report’s important messages.
Mrs. Carter understood the power of words and she could get things done with just a few of them.
In 2008, the Justice Department sued Georgia over its treatment of people with mental illnesses. Mental health advocates were locked in a battle with the state and federal governments over the terms in the proposed settlement. A judge ordered us to meet to work out an agreement. Tempers flared during the meeting, which was held at The Carter Center — so much so that the three parties retreated to separate rooms for a cooling-off period.
I was sitting with the advocates when, just a few minutes later, the others returned, followed by Mrs. Carter. She’d heard we were meeting, she said, and wanted to see how we were progressing.
She must have known things weren’t going well, but she never mentioned that. Instead, she said perhaps 10 sentences about the importance of what we were doing and her faith in our ability to find a solution. That’s all it took. We began hammering out a deal that, among other things, resulted in $275 million in new services for Georgians with mental illnesses.
Mrs. Carter was a master of human relations and she was unfailingly kind, even in the face of anger.
I recall a participant at one symposium taking to the mic to berate her – unfairly, I thought. She listened and responded without rancor. Two years later, I saw him sitting next to her at another symposium. Not only was he still on the guest list, she treated him as she would a friend. And, in fact, he now was.
Mrs. Carter always saw the big picture, which in that case involved bringing together the best people to help people with psychiatric disorders lead satisfying lives. Because of her lifelong efforts, that’s increasingly possible for hundreds of thousands of people.
She was the first lady of mental health and her voice will be sorely missed.
Cynthia Wainscott is a mental health advocate and former executive director of the National Mental Health Association of Georgia.
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