Georgia’s Central State Hospital in Milledgeville was the world’s largest psychiatric facility in the 1960s, housing 12,000 Georgians – one of them a distant cousin of future president Jimmy Carter. Before he ever ran for office, Carter and his wife Rosalynn would see the appalling conditions there whenever they visited.
Back then, folks only whispered about mental illness, but Rosalynn Carter would chase mental illness from shame’s shadows and placed it on the table to talk about. She began advocating for Georgians with mental illness while her husband was still a state senator. Then, when Jimmy became Georgia’s governor in 1971, her platform swelled, her passion grew and she would champion those with mental illness and their families for the rest of her life.
When the Carters moved to the White House, she became, essentially, the “First Lady of Mental Health Reform,” pushing to improve services and halt the “warehousing” of patients like she had seen at Central State Hospital. She was named honorary chair of the President’s Commission on Mental Health but, in reality, was its driving force as it lay the groundwork for the trailblazing Mental Health Systems Act passed in 1980.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Later, at the Carter Center, she created a sector devoted to mental health and for 32 years hosted the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Symposium to shape policy, build consensus and educate care providers. She testified before Congress for equity in mental health coverage by insurance providers, a measure that has since become – like Rosalynn herself – a gamechanger for mental illness.
In 1996, to reduce the stigma still hovering around mental illness, she established the annual Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism which, over time, would support more than 200 journalists worldwide through financial stipends and educational resources. She would aid journalists in order to touch the people journalists could reach.
With that type of stairstep approach, Rosalynn Carter’s passion touched thousands.
It also touched me.
After I became a mental health counselor two decades ago, a counseling friend invited me to the free, one-day symposium that Mrs. Carter hosted each spring at the Carter Center. I went to the seminar and learned of her fellowships for mental health journalism. I quickly applied for one because the book I wanted to write on the life and death of Henry Harris was as much about mental wellness as it was about race or sport.
I did not receive a fellowship, but it turned out that was not the reason I needed to apply. Simply writing the fellowship proposal and laying out the story’s mental health trajectories were sufficient to inspire me to begin the book.
Coincidentally, but appropriately, my wife Pat and I went to Plains several months later to attend President Carter’s Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church. Afterward, we drove a couple of hours to Auburn University’s library to begin trying to understand how Harris – Auburn’s first Black athlete at 18 and its basketball captain at 22 – became suicide’s victim at 24. Years later, when I completed “Remember Henry Harris,” I sent Rosalynn a book, not to read but to further see her influence, both large and small.
Rosalynn Carter, a farm girl from southwest Georgia, hugged the opportunity she was given and never let it go. She shaped policy globally, but her compassion also touched people, whether patients, their families, or journalists like me.
Behind the behavioral and emotional challenges of mental illness, she saw humanity. And she believed society should not give up on anyone. And for that, we should all be thankful.
Sam Heys, LPC, is a licensed mental health counselor who lives in Atlanta and is a former AJC reporter. He has written four books, including “The Winecoff Fire” and “Remember Henry Harris: Lost Icon of a Revolution.”
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