Opinion: What Rosalynn Carter understood about mental health

Few people leave the world with as much grace or influence as Rosalynn Smith Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 96. While she called her autobiography “The First Lady of Plains,” to many she was also the first lady of mental health reform. Decades ago, she took bold stances on mental health topics that, today, have become conventional wisdom: Mental health is health, stigma is deadly, and people with mental illness deserve to be part of society instead of hidden away in overcrowded, dangerous facilities.

Her leadership in this critical issue began in Georgia, when a young Jimmy Carter was elected to the state senate, and continued for decades; only recently did she step back from the Carter Center’s mental health section. Often she was called upon to guide, inform, or brainstorm, as she did in 2002 when Mike Hogan, chair of President George W. Bush’s newly named President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, asked her to speak to the commission — the first such presidential body since the one her husband had established a quarter-century prior.

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