[MUSIC] Welcome to Business Trip. I'm Greg Kubin. Mental and brain health sits between two worlds. Market-driven care and nonprofit support. Today's episode looks at the nonprofit side, specifically philanthropy and how its funding decisions shape what actually gets built. There's a massive shortfall in philanthropic capital in this area, which means that those choices matter even more. I spoke with three leaders in the space, Allison Neiman, Sabrina Gracias, and Christina Huntsman. Each offering a distinct perspective on how funding decisions get made and where the biggest gaps are today. Quick note before we begin. This episode includes discussions of suicide and suicidal ideation. Please take care of yourself and feel free to pause or skip ahead if needed. We start with Allison Neiman, CEO of Mindful Philanthropy, which convenes and advises major donors funding mental health, addiction, and well-being. The first conversation is a bird's eye view of the landscape. What funders are prioritizing, what is underfunded, and why coordination matters. [MUSIC] Why does Mindful Philanthropy exist? When I think about mental health and well-being and we know that it affects about one in four adults, I think if you were to ask any family in the United States or globally, they know somebody in their family that has either struggled with mental health or well-being. And yet when we think about the funding for mental health, it's less than 2% of all US philanthropic dollars that support mental health addiction and well-being. About four years ago, or five, I guess it was five years ago now, there were a group of funders looking at root issues. Not just addiction and opioid use, but also what was keeping access to mental health from every person who needed support and needed access to mental health care. And they landed on this systems issue of the lack of funding to mental health addiction and well-being. And that was the initial impetus for the founding of the organization. And our mission is to catalyze impactful funding to mental health addiction and well-being. I was looking at your site and one thing that struck me was that I think it was between 2020 and 2022, over 20% of the giving to mental and behavioral health came from five major funders. And it just made me think, wow, okay, so it feels almost like culturally, there's just like less of a movement occurring here. And so I guess you're helping to catalyze and enable more giving. How many people are on the platform today? I think when we started back five years ago, we worked with about 100 funders. And I would say that funders were convening at health conferences. Maybe there were a few funders that were working on mental health funding. And today through our efforts of convening and guiding funders and uplifting to different solutions in the field. We work with over 1200 funders in all 50 states and in 12 countries globally. And I would say that on the tail end of COVID-19, we saw a huge awareness around mental health. And with that awareness came an interest in funding mental health. But what we often saw funders say, I'm interested in funding mental health. And I'm going to do a learning journey. And then they would come back to us a year later. And they say, you know, I'm actually more confused now than when I started. I thought I wanted to fund you mental health. And now I don't know, should I fund education or should I fund foster care or should I fund youth development? Because mental health is so foundational to so many of the other issues that we care about. And it's so intersectional to other issue areas. And so often people don't know where mental health starts and stops. And that's a lot of the work we do is simplifying what is a really complex and vast landscape and helping funders understand where they can start, where they can have the most impact with their dollar and where it aligns with their values and honestly the vision that they have for how they would use their philanthropic funding. So what are the causes that are being supported the most today? We see some clear trends. The first is that almost all the funders in our network are either funding youth mental health or they're trying to fund youth mental health. So this one is pretty significant in terms of the interest and people trying to figure out where in the trajectory of youth they want to put their dollar. So we define youth broadly from zero to 25. And then within youth we've broken it down into three areas. The first is what we call strong start to life. So how do we think about those first three to five years of a child's life when that's where bonding attachment. It's where the research shows us that this is determining life outcomes. And we think about family mental health. There's been a lot of talk about youth mental health but we know that youth want close relationships with adults with trusted people and advisors. And so the family mental health and looking at it as an ecosystem is really important. The second thing that we're trying to help funders see is this area of what we call play and grow. And so this area is looking at purpose and thinking about loneliness and community, but also looking at sports and arts and nature and how do those things help to develop a child and prepare them for often those kind of turbulent teenage years helping youth develop the skills like resilience and grit that are necessary for those later years. And then we have to talk about digital well-being because 95% of teens are using social media. And what's we're seeing now is that over 72% of teens have also tried AI companions. So thinking about how do we help teens develop good digital well-being habits and practices and educate the family on what this means. Okay, so youth mental health number one. Yep. What about number two? I would say workforce. If you've tried to get in to see a therapist, you've tried to get in to have access to mental health oftentimes. It's a cash-based system in some states like New York, Reim based, although that's changed in recent years and is changing. But then also you are often on a wait list or you don't know where to go for a warm handoff from your primary care physician. So that's a huge issue that we face right now and I think we're seeing some real innovation in that space around workforce because we're never going to treat our way out of this issue. There's not going to be enough therapist, psychiatrists, psychologists for the work that's needed. And so we're seeing innovation around peer support models thinking about lay workforce who can be bridges to care in the community. So looking at community initiated care as a way to support the more traditional workforce that's out there. Well, let's look on the other side of the spectrum. Where is the most need? Well, that's what's hard about the mental health space right now. There's need everywhere, but I would be remiss if I didn't point to especially underserved populations, whether it is rural, you could say LGBTQ+ black and brown communities, those that might be losing Medicaid benefits, like there is great and tremendous need right now. I would also say because we've seen a lot of efforts from funders to go more upstream, which we should be balancing those with most severe needs, with those are thinking about how we swim upstream to the root of the issues, but that also leaves those that maybe are facing challenges from serious mental illness at risk of losing services or not having services, those that are in crisis. So that's what's challenging about the mental health space is balancing that that need and the crisis and those that most need services right now with thinking about how do we actually stem the crisis? How do we get to the root issues and how do we solve for that? And we focus on both at Mindful. It's interesting because as you were talking earlier about, for instance, supporting workforce care, let's say, to employees, I think about the fact that there are lots of for-profit companies, some of which are startups, some of which are services businesses that are effectively seeking to serve that same population. So I'm curious how you think what the role is for philanthropic support versus for-profit initiatives today? I think it has to be a blended approach. We are seeing more companies take up the issue of mental health and especially workplace well-being. It's important because we know that when people are feeling their best and then that's when they're able to be productive and work and have really healthy relationships. I think we see specifically around the workplace well-being, we see a number of nonprofits that are doing great job. One that comes to mind is one-mind at work. They're doing significant and tremendous work around in serving the four-profit companies to not just think about workplace well-being as an issue, but to look at holistically through an index that they have. How do they get their leadership teams on board? How do they serve the staff and employees through their well-being benefits? How do they actually have conversation and support groups? There's 10 different indicators that they look at as a diagnostic and then they help to create the conversations and the strategy and the things to ensure that there's adequate workplace well-being being done. And so I think that's the place where nonprofits are not motivated by a profit or a bottom line. We have a double and sometimes triple bottom line where we're looking at what's the most the most targeted approach to impact and how do we actually seek that. So I would say that would be one around workplace well-being, but I also think that around mental health in general, we have to take an approach of public-private partnerships where we're seeing companies and then we're seeing other private capital come to the table. We know for a fact that the philanthropic capital for that's supporting mental health right now, it's very small. As I said, it's less than 2%. We saw that at 1.3% in about 2021, 2020, and now it's up to 1.7%. But this is a very small amount last year or in 2022. So the data lags behind, but it was only 2.3 billion that came from foundations. And so when we think about the trillions of dollars that's going into healthcare, you know, and about the 10 billion and overall funding that's out there in mental health, the philanthropic capital is not going to be sufficient. So we have to think of blended forms of capital that are aligned and that are going to the same solutions so that we have scale of funding to make the solutions effective. So you've mentioned this 1.7% number of U.S. philanthropy going to mental health. Is there a goal that you have in mind of what you want that to be or what you think it should be? Yeah, it's hard to measure in percentage, but we a few years ago, we wanted to call the field to action. And so we knew that it was, the numbers are never going to be perfect because one of the biggest issues we have is that we're making decisions and we're working with broken data systems. We don't have a complete data system, so we don't have the ability to make really targeted decisions. So what we did is we issued a call to action for philanthropy that by the year of 2035, there would be 35 billion annually going to mental health, addiction, and well-being. In 2022, there was about 2.3 billion that's increased slightly over the last few years, but 35 billion is a significant number. And so what we're calling funders to is to 7x to 8x their funding to mental health. And that by doing that, not only will they see mental health improve, but by integrating it into other issue areas such as education and housing and economic mobility that will start to see all of those things rise in outcomes. So we're hoping to see 35 billion annually go to mental health, addiction, and well-being. And this sounds astronomical, but when you think about the population levels that we're predicting and projecting for 2035, it's only about $100 per U.S. citizen. And if you think about how that could return in effective healthcare, you know, in workforce productivity and healthy relationships and families, and even intergenerational, you know, health, I think it's a pretty good investment. >> Mm-hmm. When you said public-private partnerships, are you thinking about states? Are you thinking about federal government? Do you have a system in mind? >> Right now, we're working with a lot of states. So a few years ago, we started to see that there were a few really interesting factors related to mental health funders. One, they were mostly place-based. And when I say place-based, I don't just mean at the state level. They were oftentimes focused on one zip code or two zip codes for their local city. And that's where most of their funding was going. And this makes sense because a lot of funders, they come to this work for very personal reasons. They maybe have lost a loved one or they know someone who's struggling. And so they want to invest in the community and in the systems and the community so that their loved one didn't have to suffer or that their family didn't have to go through what they went through. And so what we see is that investment in the community level. And so we started doing some listening tours with funders. We went on the road to about seven different states. We also did some work in Montana a few years ago where we brought together funders and we looked at a statewide strategy for not just philanthropy but collaborating with the state government. And that eventually returned pretty quickly at $300 million public trust with a very small investment of philanthropic capital. And so what we did in the last year is we launched something called a collaborative action network. This network are groups of funders that have state collaboratives for philanthropy and multi-stakeholder collaboratives that are operating at the state level. And they're working on policy, they're working on advocacy, they're working on coordinated funding to make systems better and more accessible and more coordinated. And so what we've done recently is we've brought all of the leaders of those collaboratives together to a national collaborative action network. And they're now the goal is to speed up this work, right, to reduce the silos and the fragmentation. And so these leaders are all now in community. We have about 15 of the states represented in this group and we're increasing that. We're working to launch five groups right now. And they're looking at case studies. They're looking at how did you do this in this this red state or this blue state? How can we adapt it for our circumstances? And so we see that as a real promising model. We see a lot of momentum behind that model. And we're beginning to help funders find ways they can plug in their local state collaborative if they're not already plugged in. Who are some of the most active funders? The ballroom group made an investment of 72 million to expand and strengthen CCBHC. So certified community behavioral health clinics across three states. Illinois, Kansas and Michigan. This is a huge investment in workforce as we were talking about that as an issue earlier. We've seen the Arthur and Blank Family Foundation is five xing their current funding. And over the next 10 years they're going to be focused on youth. But they're dramatically increasing their funding in a response to that call to action that we issued. We saw here in New York, Brian Bays, we saw the Lori to Imtish Illumination Fund make a $10 million multi-year youth sports and mental health initiative is what they launched that support sports to improve youth mental health. My last question is, is there any mental health or self-care practice that has been really helpful to you in your own path? There's some things I need for my own mental health. And there's barometers is what I tell my team of when I have good mental health because I'm on the road a lot. I'm traveling and I would say I need to be in nature. That nature is oftentimes for me personally is something that gives me life. It helps me to quiet my mind. So being out exercising, walking in nature. I would also say that faith is a huge part of my life and something I rely on for my own faith practices. Our team does meditation as we start our team meetings just to stay grounded. And then there are things that I enjoy doing so making sure that I have time for that when I'm on the road and traveling but making sure that those are woven into my schedule so that I don't lose that sense of groundedness. Next is Sabrina Gracias. She's the founder of the Ortex Foundation. It's a nonprofit focused on youth mental health and suicide prevention in the inner mountain region. This is a largely rural mountainous part of the US, including states like Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming, where national solutions often miss local realities. Ortex is a relatively new foundation and her story shows why regional place-based initiatives matter and how youth mental health moves from awareness to action. Why don't we start with Ortex? I'm interested in the fact that it's a relatively new nonprofit and I'm always curious as to why start something new, what kind of gaps you saw that existed in mental health and why you did it. In May of 2022, a very close friend of mine, her son, took his life as a freshman in Princeton. And at the same time, I also had at that point a 15-year journey with a family member also dealing with mental health issues. And what I realized was in both of these cases of young kids to emerging adults, the path of care was really this single path of care, where an issue was identified with a child, mental health issue, or some kind of complexities. And it was evaluated and then there was a treatment plan and then that treatment plan worked for a couple years. And then those issues would escalate. And another treatment plan would come to bear and you would get another therapist or more therapy. And coming out of COVID, it was a complete crisis. And realizing that we have to look at youth and children, really from this holistic approach of putting the child in the center and developing strategies and tool sets all around them for safety and community and belonging and therapy. And as they grow, those different tool sets have to expand and change. And that was really one of the main reasons behind starting Ordis, which Ordis means to rise up in Latin. Thank you for sharing your story. Getting more tactical here in terms of Ordis' initiatives, how do you think about the buckets at the moment? We spent the first year really talking to anybody in the field. The mental health field when you go into it as a philanthropy is really vast. You can focus on research and workforce development, school programming. And what actually ended up happening two years ago, I was in Jackson, Hawaii, Oming, and I've had a long history going there over the last 20 years actually. And I heard Dr. Kent Corso speak. He's a suicide expert and talking about the social determinants of mental health in the inter-mountain region, which are so vastly different than urban populations and urban cities. And I have a long history of personal connection to Jackson, Hawaii, Oming. And I was absolutely floored at the statistics he was presenting and that this whole area was actually coined the suicide belt of America. And as I started to dig into it, I realized that there was really very little national focus on that specific area, those five states, as well as rural America in general. And how we address suicide and mental health in these rural areas versus urban cities. And that's when we really honed in on our focus at Ordis Foundation. So we are exclusively focused on youth mental health and suicide prevention in the inter-mountain region. So I went to one of your conferences and it was definitely different than any event I've been to in that it was so hyper local. And to your point, specific, like for instance, I was struck by one of the challenges in the region is how far everything is. And especially in the winter when roads are closed that creates longer commute times. There's a shortage of clinicians and you brought in folks from Colorado and Utah. And it was just so neat to see them sharing their stories and also resources and ideas. And it was like, wow, this is like something I didn't think was needed but really is needed. Very much so. And still we are working with large national organizations like the Jet Foundation to really bring in their expertise into these areas. There's really a lot of cultural differences. I mean, even if you look at the major source of communication out there, still they use radio and billboards. And going into these areas, you really have to be boots on the ground, very culturally sensitive, trust building in these communities really takes a long time. And yeah, we're really excited about being there and the impact that we're going to hopefully see in the over the course of the next years. Is there one or two initiatives in particular that you find to be most compelling about what can be done to address the issue? We always go back to focusing on school-based mental health programs. Kids spend a majority of their time in the school and working in those areas, you do have some legislative challenges in terms of what can be presented in schools and mental health support. And so some of those revocs were able to circumnavigate but definitely school-based mental health programming and looking at peer-to-peer support, peer-to-peer support in the school system is really, really effective. It's very, very low cost but has a really high effective rate. And then also doing a lot of intergenerational education with parents and grandparents. So it's not necessarily the students that have a hard time talking about mental health. It's the generational gap between them and their parents. And in terms of philanthropic angle, then is Ordis also donating to school programs within the region or is it really focused on being a catalyst to bringing together the players in the ecosystem? Yeah, it's a combination of both. You know, when you look at kind of both for-profit and non-for-profit investing, we don't really delineate between the two actually. And so sometimes the programs come in as a for-profit opportunity and sometimes they come in as non-for-profit. How do you think about the distinction between the two? Like how do you think about the difference? I think we're saying that a lot of funders are not really actually making the distinction between for-profit and non-for-profit as much anymore, but more as a spectrum of tools that we can use to advance youth mental health and suicide prevention. So the role is really to understand which mechanism, whether it's philanthropy or investment capital, can really accelerate the impact in any given situation. So when we look at something, we ask the question, does this really reduce risk, does it improve youth mental health and reduce suicide prevention? So we don't choose between the two, we really integrate philanthropy helps communities, schools and families build infrastructure and investment capital really changes systems by fueling tools, platforms, AI and innovations in these communities where they can build long-term. So I think it's really an exciting time to have that flexibility because the reality is that nonprofits are essential because they do what markets often can't do or what they won't be doing. And so non-profits really can create this foundation of care with giving in grants and community partnerships and for-profits are really looking at scaling what's working and true innovation in the field of mental health. I also know that you have funded some research as well. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of which was/is in psychedelic medicine, cared to share any of the studies that you have funded that you're particularly excited about? Yeah absolutely. We tend to fund things that other people don't want to fund. So there is an opportunity right now that's not quite done. There's only one other university that is doing that in the adolescent space in psychedelics but it's not quite signed. It's still waiting for IRB approval. If you look at psychedelics, most of it has really been done on the adult population. We are very interested in looking at the adolescent population. 16 or 17, the FDA did approve prior to the negative Lycos ruling and now they want us to bump it up to 18 to 21 which is okay and we'll get there. So but the one I'm really excited about is a four-year study. We're on the second phase of it so we're entering into year two with Baylor College of Medicine and it's one around harm reduction in the psychedelic retreat space. So there's 300 participants globally. There has never been a study done in the psychedelic retreat space and the goal there is to get a consensus based, evidence based approach to best practices and standards of care. So whether you're a large organization like Beckley retreats, hosting retreat spaces or something much more underground, it's really to protect both sides, both parties and harm reduction and really a platform for best practices. I'm curious, anything else you want to cover, Sabrina? I think when we look at how we need more suicide prevention or mental health tools in the field, I don't think it necessarily depends on like modalities. I think it depends on kind of this infrastructure change, right? When we're looking at suicide prevention initiatives, it's not that just we're solving for one variable. So we can't just solve for crisis intervention or suicide prevention. What we really need is this whole continuum of care for a child like I mentioned before and solving for kind of basic determinants of mental health. Last, we look at what large scale long-term mental health philanthropy can build. Christina Huntsman and her family helped launch the Huntsman Mental Health Institute at the University of Utah with major investments in crisis care and translational research. This segment explores what it looks like to design a mental health system from the ground up and how philanthropy might inform what the clinic of the future could be. So I want to start off by asking why do you fund mental health? I lost my sister 15 years ago to a drug overdose. We were 17 months apart and we grew up sharing a room together. We had our children together and why am I here telling her story? On a larger context, it has to do with my whole family, my parents and all of my siblings. When you take a big step back and you think about what you've experienced within the family and whatnot, what's your goal ultimately with funding mental health philanthropy? Our goal is so that no other families have to experience what we experience. In a larger context, my father, when he passed away, he left his foundation to his children and he dedicated the latter part of his life the last 30 years to finding a cure for cancer. And he helped create the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He was a business man. He started out with nothing, came from very poor circumstances growing up and he had a drive to build and create something to make money so he could give it back. He sometimes was giving away money faster than he was making it but there was that intense desire for him to give back because he knew what it was like to be without and to be one paycheck away from being homeless. And so he told us growing up, I am going to leave the book of my money to my foundation. And I think he wanted to be remembered more for philanthropy than for business. And upon his passing, he told us, he said, find the cancer of your generation. So our foundation continues to fund what he started with cancer and that's been a 30 year legacy project. And as his children, as we sat around thinking, okay, what should we create? Our foundation is different than most foundations where we're not grant giving. My father liked to build and create things. And as a business man, he created the Huntsman Cancer Institute. So he created something from scratch, basically. We had an opportunity to partner with the University of Utah, similar how my dad did with cancer and that partnership with the university, which is an A1 university, which is an important aspect because it has the research component because we can't discover diseases and create new treatments and cures unless we have that research background. We approached the university with a gift around mental health. At the time, as we were all sitting around, of course, there's an empty chair from my sister, but it's not just her story. Every one of us siblings, personally, our children, I'm a mother of seven, grandmother of 16. We all experienced some sort of mental health with our children or grandchildren, but we don't share it like we do cancer or diabetes because that stigma is so great. And so we toured a facility. It was what they considered at the time, their mental health hospital. Of course, it's separated from the main hospital at the University of Utah because that's what you do with mental health patients. You put them as far away and in the dark sort of speak is other patients because we don't treat mental health in substance use the same as we do. Someone's comes in for a heart attack or needs a broken bone fixed. I remember when we checked my sister into detox for the first time. It was at night in an older building in a dark room. It didn't have the same light and beauty right up the street that the Huntsman Cancer Institute has that my dad wanted to create like a Ritz Carlton because he knew that if you could go into a beautiful space, it gave people hope and love and dignity. As we talked amongst my siblings, we said, okay, how much money do we gift? And my one brother said it needs to be big enough that it can make a statement, at least make the newspapers. And as we toured the facility, the University President at the time, we said we don't need to put our name on it. And she said, you have to put your name on it because nobody puts their name around mental health. And so we gave a gift of $150 million. And at the time, it was the largest mental health gift associated with the University. And they renamed Uni into Huntsman Mental Health Institute. So I would love to talk briefly about the clinic. From what I've gathered, there's some really forward thinking components to it. Everything from the lighting to the intake process. Yeah, so we have our main hospital with impatience, and that hospital has been there since the 80s. But what we just opened is called the Crisis Care Center. And it's a different model. So if you think of emergency care for mental health, and the emergency room is amazing if you are bleeding out, if you are having a medical condition. But if it's a mental health condition, sometimes you get put to the back of the line. Because it's hard to see how much pain you're in when you don't see the bone sticking out as a broken bone, and you're not bleeding out. It's sometimes really hard to fix the things you can't see. So we knew what my parents created at the Huntsman Cancer Center of a beautiful space. We knew what it was like to check my sister into detox. How could we create a space that treated people with love and dignity that they wanted to come to? And I remember having a meeting with some of the hospital administrators and people designing the building. And we said, what would you create if money was not an object? And Kevin Curtis said to us, well, in mental health, we've never been able to think that way because we're always underfunded. So you go into a beautiful space. It's 24/7, non-refusal, no appointment needed. And you go into a space where you're treated with love and dignity. And we try and get you back to be assessed in about 15 minutes. You can bring your family or loved ones back with you to be assessed. And there you are assessed is to how acute your problem is. Oftentimes, if it's just a prescription refill or if you're manifesting a lot of symptoms, maybe they'll take you right up to the third floor for inpatient. But for the most part, you can wait in this room with your family versus an emergency room where sometimes you'll wait up to seven or eight hours in a loud room watching other people go back. And sometimes that can exasperate the mental health crisis that you're in or substance use. And so you can be in a room under a watchful care of a nurse. So depending on which route is the team likes to say there's no wrong door and no wrong approach. They want to get to the bottom of what is causing somebody to come in the first place. It's not just we're going to put a bandaid on and get you out the doors as fast as possible. It's really important that we have those wraparound services. So we have a receiving center with three different pods with 10 reclining chairs in each pod so that they can separate out if it's substance use or mood disorder or a psychotic episode kind of clump patients together. And there's a nurse station in the middle, nurses in the middle so that they can observe with patient rooms on the outside so that they can observe you in this setting while you're waiting. And we have art therapy while you're waiting or music therapy. And then the doctor can come in and pull you from the clusters and have a conversation and get to the bottom of the problem. And then from there if you need inpatient you will be taken to the third floor. On our second floor we have outpatient. We have a free legal clinic. We have a free dental clinic and research. So really getting to the root of the problem so we can show the data of why are people coming in, what is our outcome, and to show that this is a new model of care. Also on the first floor there's no wrong door to come in. We have an entrance in the backside for law enforcement. The creation of this building took about four years because the partnerships with law enforcement, so many of the community service providers in the area, it was really important for the team to hear what they needed so that when somebody leaves this building they have those wraparound services. So law enforcement can come in the back entrance and drop off. And the team said to them, what do you need in this space? And they said so often times we are in the emergency room waiting eight to ten hours. We cannot leave the patient until they are either checked in or they are released. So that's taking up a lot of our law enforcement's time waiting. In this space they can come in and we have it down to about seven to eight minutes. They can bring somebody in, get their paperwork done, use the restroom, get a snack, and then be right back on the street doing the job that they were trained to do. Wow, so when you think about this whole design choices you made here, do you see this as a blueprint really for clinics elsewhere? Absolutely, so we want to be able to show what works so that other counties, other cities, other states can look at it and adapt it to what works in their area. And so I just look at what it was like when we checked my sister in and think, wow, if we could have taken her someplace like the crisis care center, maybe her story would have been different. Maybe we would have gotten her care earlier on. Yeah, make sense. I want to change gears here to discuss the translational research that you've been funding as well. I saw a lot of different labs that were studying everything from geriatric mental health to genetic links to psychiatric illness. Yes, since I am not a doctor, nobody in my family, we're not doctors or clinicians. And that's why we are just in awe of our amazing research team because that's not a specialty that any of us have. So it's very exciting for us to see funds being put behind different research because we know that we will not have new treatments or cures unless that research is done. We watched with cancer that was the first building that my father put in was the research for cancer. We have such an amazing research team, but we would love for that to grow. And that's why the translational research building will be able to bring all of these researchers and everybody under one rough together. So we can go from the test lab to creating an imaging will have a Tesla three and a Tesla seven, the only Tesla seven targeting just brain diseases. So really be able to go from test case to having a patient come in and study in the brain to hopefully getting new treatments and cures when you're talking about substance use, mood disorders, autism, anxiety, depression, suicide, you name it, we have we have people working on it. Curious if you want to talk about the research around the suicide gene. Yes. And you tell we have one coroner's office and so they have been able to go back in get the research and around suicide. We have the Utah population database and so we're able to have the records and the genetic components of people that have committed suicide. So researchers are putting that into AI so that they can identify markers of if you have a genetic component and what does that look like similar to what we did with cancer discovering the bracket gene for breast cancer. So by having that Utah database the population database really we're really lucky that we have that so that we can get the genetic components and see is there a genetic component to depression to suicide. And so that's why it's exciting that we're just on the beginning side of that. Hopefully in the next five, 10 years we'll be able to have more of a road map of just what somebody's brain looks like and here's the tools, here's the medication, here's what you should stay away from and there's just so much that we don't know about the brain. With all these initiatives going on, how do you think about the future the next couple of years, the next decade? Oh, I am so excited for the future. I have so much hope and I am so excited because I see the work that we're doing and I see our suicide numbers going down and I see that there are things that are working and so it's getting the message out but partnership and getting the funding is what we're going to need. So the more funds that come in, the faster we can expand, the faster we can change the model and the faster we can save lives. Across these conversations what stood out wasn't optimism or despair. It was responsibility. Mental health isn't abstract. It's local, it's structural and it shows up whether systems are ready or not. These were philanthropists not acting from profit motive but from a sense of obligation to build what markets won't. Some people wait for permission, others just start building. This episode was about the ones who chose to build to build. This is Business Trip, a podcast exploring the future of brain and mental health and the startups building it. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @SymedVentures and if you're building a company in Frontier Brain and Mental Health hit us up at
[email protected] which you can find in the show notes. I'm Greg Kubin, production was led by Caitlin Near, sound design and engineering came from Niko Re. Our theme music is by Dorian Love and additional music credits are in the show notes. This is Business Trip. Thanks for tripping with us. We'll see you next time.
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