Steinberg Institute founder Darrell Steinberg delivers remarks at UCLA celebration
50 years. It’s always important to give special honor to the pioneers. Those Individuals and organizations that led this charge when few paid attention and fewer seemed to care.
That Semel and that’s UCLA.
We are now living in an era where everyone is paying attention to mental health.
We are finally having our moment.
50 years ago , we rarely talked about it, we rarely addressed it. Those who took it on, who believed that homelessness need not be hopelessness, who decried that idea that the heart or lungs or knees or arms are somehow more important than the brain, who witnessed daily a clean room for a person with a physical emergency but a gurney and hallway for a person with a psychiatric emergency, who have seen too many young people lose their lives to suicide, those who have tried to change that unacceptable state, you are the heroes and sheroes.
Without the tens of millions of dollars invested in research, without the innovation, without the new models of clinical care like wrap around and permanent supportive housing, without the life altering interventions for children and families, we would not have gotten as far as we have together over 50 years.
And still, we can celebrate the saving of innumerable lives, but we can not rest on any laurels. There are still too many suffering as is obvious to what you see every day on our streets, in your emergency rooms and clinics.
So celebrate we will. But this celebration must also be a vow. A vow to strengthen Semel and its work. A vow to find cures. A vow to fight for the day where mental health care and housing are society’s moral and legal obligations, not mere discretionary acts of governments and insurance companies. A vow to take note of the attitudes and hope of young people who now freely talk about depression, moods, and OCD.
I can imagine many of you and for those like me, a little older, our successors standing here at the 75th anniversary of Semel.
What story will they tell? Only we can answer that question.
It would be easy to retreat especially in the current era where it’s common and often accepted to blame the person who is different and who is considered to be the ‘other’. Especially true for those suffering from untreated mental illness and substance abuse. These are also especially harrowing times for those of us for you-who believe that investing in scientific and health research is not a national luxury and who see the potential decimation of science and health care as the travesty it is.
So what is the answer. Keep fighting and keep insisting on upholding the best of our values. See a month ahead and see 25 years ahead.
Continue to show how many lives are saved and improved and uplift the multi disciplinary work of Semel; the cutting edge research and its direct connection to community and clinical care; continue to insist that helping many while many more suffer is never enough.
The most dramatic breakthroughs in science and medicine that have cured many cancers, improved the quality of life for people with chronic physical conditions, prevented disease through vaccination and early detection—-many similar breakthroughs are still to be had with mental illness and addiction.
Let those breakthroughs be your story out story over the next years and decades. People who we will never know and meet are counting on us.
Happy birthday Semel and thank you.