Rosalynn Carter has long been an advocate for mental health and recently published a new book with Susan K. Golant and Kathryn E. Cade entitled “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis.”
The 83-year old former First Lady was at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Columbia Point on Sunday to discuss it.
As she has in the past, Carter mentioned that since mental institutions have fallen out of fashion, prisons have become caregivers to much of the mentally ill population. She said now that the causes of mental illness are increasingly understood to be physiological, a “biological stigma” has replaced a moral stigma but families still hide it, often to the detriment of the sufferers.
Carter shared the stage of Stephen Smith Hall with Dr. Peter Kramer, professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of “Listening to Prozac.”