East Room
10:00 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. Welcome to the White House. And thank you, Janelle, for that introduction and sharing your story, and making such a difference through your organization. We’re really proud to have you here.
I want to thank Secretary Sebelius, Secretary Arne Duncan, Secretary Ric Shinseki for their leadership and helping to organize this event. And I also want to acknowledge some outstanding members of Congress who are here and who care deeply about this issue.
And finally, I want to thank all of you for participating in this national conference on mental health. We wanted to bring together folks who’ve suffered from mental illness and families who’ve supported them. We wanted to bring together advocates and educators, faith leaders, veterans, local officials.
All of you have shown an extraordinary commitment to what is a critical goal, and that is to make sure that people aren’t suffering in silence and that we have the capacity to pull together all the resources and support and love that’s out there to go after an extraordinary challenge in our society.
The main goal of this conference is not to start a conversation — so many of you have spent decades waging long and lonely battles to be heard. Instead, it’s about elevating that conversation to a national level and bringing mental illness out of the shadows.
We want to let people living with mental health challenges know that they are not alone, and we’ve got to be making sure that we’re committed to support those fellow Americans, because struggling with a mental illness or caring for someone who does can be isolating. And I think everybody here who’s experienced the issue in one way or another understands that. It begins to feel as if not only are you alone, but that you shouldn’t burden others with the challenge and the darkness, day in, day out — what some call a cloud that you just can't seem to escape — begins to close in.
The truth is, in any given year, one in five adults experience a mental illness — one in five. Forty-five million Americans suffer from things like depression or anxiety, schizophrenia or PTSD. Young people are affected at a similar rate. So we all know somebody — a family member, a friend, a neighbor — who has struggled or will struggle with mental health issues at some point in their lives. Michelle and I have both known people who have battled severe depression over the years, people we love. And oftentimes, those who seek treatment go on to lead happy, healthy, productive lives.
So we know that recovery is possible, we know help is available, and yet, as a society, we often think about mental health differently than other forms of health. You see commercials on TV about a whole array of physical health issues, some of them very personal. (Laughter.) …read more
Source: White House Press Office
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