Former First Lady Rosalynn Smith Carter, who turned her role into a job that created lasting impacts in public policy and in individual lives that we still feel today, passed away on Nov. 19 at age 96.
In her years of life, including a 77-year long marriage with former President Jimmy Carter, she was a woman of grace and influence who was able to create her own legacy through her passion of mental health advocacy.
“I do not think there has ever been another sort of leader in the mental health field who has had as much of an impact on mental health care and access to care and how we think about mental health and mental illness as Mrs. Carter,” said Kathryn Cade, vice chair of The Carter Center Board of Trustees and a board member of The Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers. “And I think it has to do with her incredible concern about the issue and her perseverance for more than 50 years.”
During Carter’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, Rosalynn Carter encountered many citizens that voiced their concerns about their friends and family being housed at overcrowded psychiatric hospitals that had deplorable and dehumanizing conditions for their residents.
Carter was able to see these conditions in person when she and her husband visited Tommy, her husband’s distant cousin, at the Georgia Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. Then, there were 13,000 people crammed in this psychiatric hospital. Along with this, she visited and volunteered at all 12 of Georgia’s psychiatric hospitals, including volunteering once a week at the Georgia Regional Hospital. She was hands-on during this time, reading to children, talking to adults struggling with addictions and participating in extracurricular activities with the elderly.
In a time when mental health was surrounded with negative stigmas, with a more common belief that people with mental illness should be put away in overcrowded and dangerous psychiatric facilities, Carter took mental health stances that are reflective of norms today. Her work centered around humanity and pushed to fight the stigma around mental health. Carter worked to normalize ideas like mental health is health, stigma is deadly and people that suffer from mental illnesses deserve to be a part of our society and that no one should be given up on.
“Twenty-five years ago, we did not dream that people might someday be able actually to recover from mental illnesses,” Carter said to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. “Today, it is a very real possibility.”
Carter left her mark on the fight for mental health throughout her life. She had a significant impact on public policy during her time as First Lady and continued her work after Carter left the White House.
When Carter was the governor of Georgia, she created and participated in a state commission to improve mental health services to the mentally and emotionally handicapped. This continued through Carter’s presidential administration, where he signed an executive order establishing a presidential commission on mental health in 1977. She acted as an honorary chair of the President’s Commission on Mental Health, where she brought forth the passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980.
Carter was a public advocate for mental health and fought for improvements in mental health programs throughout her life. She was the face of mental health advocacy efforts around the country, like voicing concerns in the public space and testifying before Congress for increasing the funding for mental health programs. She lobbied Congress to create a landmark law that requires insurers to provide equality in mental health coverage.
After her husband’s presidential administration, Carter was unable to influence government policy in the same way, but she continued to create spaces for mental health advocacy in many forms. The Carter Center in Atlanta was founded by President and Mrs. Carter in 1982 in partnership with Emory University to “advance peace and health worldwide.”
In 1996, Carter launched a fellowship program for mental health journalism and has awarded over 220 fellows worldwide, according to The Carter Center’s website.
“Mrs. Carter was the first person to ever ask me how my journalism would make an impact,” said Aaron Glantz, a fellowship recipient and bureau chief and senior editor at The Fuller Project. “It was such an obvious question that it changed my life. These days, the question of impact is regularly discussed in newsrooms, especially on investigative desks. But at the time, considering the purpose of one’s journalism was often considered taboo.”
The Center’s efforts included training journalists to combat stigmas through storytelling.
“From the earliest days of her time as first lady, she always believed that journalists were key to changing public attitudes about mental health and mental illness,” Cade said. “The fellows program has demonstrated that in so many different ways.”
In 1985, she initiated the Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy which aims to bring together mental health organizations around the nation to work on key issues. The first topic that year surrounded the mental health stigma. The symposium became a key part of creating mental health reform around the country.
Carter continued the fight for mental health advocacy through the rest of her life, transforming legislation, diminishing negative perceptions and promoting humanitarian efforts for mental health.
While Carter and her husband worked together on other issues, like launching programs that monitored elections in at least 113 countries and nearly eradicted the Guinea worm parasite in the developing world, Carter’s work for mental health was transformative in the United States. President Carter has said that The Carter Center would have been a success had it accomplished nothing but his wife’s mental health work. Healthcare experts say that her advocacy has created a framework for a significant portion of mental health progress nationwide.
“Rosalynn Carter’s deep compassion for people everywhere and her untiring strength on their behalf touched lives around the world,” the Carter family said in a statement. “We have heard from thousands of you since her passing. Thank you all for joining us in celebrating what a treasure she was, not only to us, but to all humanity.”
