Note: This column appeared in the Indianapolis Business Journal on May 5, 2023.

A deterioration in the mental health of Americans, especially young Americans, has been developing slowly and insidiously for many years now. The causes of this decline are complex, but it has been exacerbated for decades by a lack of investment in behavioral health services and care. The pandemic also has sharply accelerated this deterioration.

Behavioral health has also lagged in philanthropic investments, as it is unfortunately not as high-profile as other areas such as cancer and cardiac research and care. These have benefited immensely from a constant stream of multimillion-dollar gifts for many years that have had significant impacts on research and treatment.

Today, we ubiquitously use the word “crisis” to describe this situation, but it is no longer an exaggeration. It spares few families—ours is no exception. Many state governments have begun to act—sometimes in rare shows of bipartisan unity.

In an earlier IBJ commentary, former Indiana University Health CEO Dan Evans and John Lechleiter, former chair and CEO of Eli Lilly and Co., spotlighted several important steps state leaders have recently taken to improve access to mental health care for Hoosiers. And health systems, including IU Health, have steadily increased their investments in this area.

During the 14 years we served IU, the university made the physical and mental well-being of students a top priority, adopting strong policies and practices to bolster student success. The behavioral health of the IU community was a major concern as part of the university’s science-based response to COVID-19, and IU’s student body itself has established many meritorious student-generated initiatives.

But private philanthropy must now also play its part in addressing this crisis and invest in behavioral health on the same scale it has in more traditional areas.

Earlier this month, we made a gift of $500,000 to IU Health to support behavioral health services at the IU Regional Academic Health Center in Bloomington. IU Health will match our gift, bringing its total impact to $1 million.

Our gift focuses particularly on expanding and enhancing peer counseling and other mental health services for 18- to 34-year-olds—a demographic in which there is major need, especially among undergraduate and graduate college students.

Members of this demographic are particularly vulnerable to depression, substance use disorder, eating disorders, achievement anxiety, difficult workplace environments, and the impact and trauma resulting from racial, gender-based and other violence. In 2022, about 10,000 patients at the clinic were seen for behavioral health problems—30% of them ages 18 to 34.

Peer counseling has been shown to be a particularly effective way of addressing behavioral health problems, especially to help young people cope with these challenges. The establishment of new peer counseling services will also provide an opportunity for health science students to work in this area and for this to become part of the practical work for their degrees.

We hope our gift will help ensure that people get the help they need in a way that most effectively enables them to overcome barriers to their personal and academic success. We hope it will contribute to a world where there is greater stigma-free understanding of mental health problems and where there is widespread access to providers and support services for patients of all ages.

And we hope it will inspire others to give and to experience the satisfaction that can come from contributing—in whatever form and at whatever level—toward something so enormously important and impactful to the welfare of the next generation.•

Michael A. McRobbie is university chancellor, president emeritus and university professor at Indiana University. He served as IU’s president from 2007 to 2021. Laurie Burns McRobbie is a university fellow.