“Originally, when I came on, we had a CEO for the Huntsman Mental Health Institute who was also the department chair of psychiatry, and we had a grand challenge to become a nationally leading authority on mental health needs and to reduce stigma around mental health.

For example, among young people, they’re more likely to talk about feeling stressed or feeling depressed, rather than going to seek help. But in different populations, older people or racially minoritized groups that might have had historically negative experiences with mental health care providers or experiments, they might be distrustful of going to seek professional help.

What we know from the data is that most people don’t seek mental health care providers out first. What they do is they either turn to their religious faith— somebody in the church—or they turn to family or friends. Those are the initial groups that most people will turn to. And we know that’s true for many African Americans and Latinx folks. So, what we also want to do is to make them more aware of what the best practices around mental health and mental health counseling are. They should also know they can lean on places like our institute.

So we’re no longer doing the grand challenge, but we’re now focusing on making a national impact by strengthening what we do locally. That is to make sure the foundation of our outreach covers the Wasatch Front and the state of Utah. Our goal is to be one of the number one mental health care providers in the country, similar to the way the Mayo Clinic is to medicine.

If someone needs mental health care, this is one of the places that offers the best care, best research, best clinicians, best academics for preparing students to go out and impact the world.

The Huntsman family gave us $150 million for not only the naming rights of the institute, but also to make sure we get a great head start in this area.

After losing a sibling to suicide, the other Huntsman children took that issue and said, ‘That’s going to be our centerpiece, so other people don’t have to go through what we went through.’ That is why they were all-in on creating the Huntsman Mental Health Institute.

For me, one of the things I’m really excited about is the direction Huntsman Mental Health is going. We have some great people in place doing really great work.

The work that I bring to the institute is respected and people acknowledge it, and we see that across the country, many more counseling centers have therapists who have a background in racial battle fatigue.

It’s just another way we’re going to impact society. That’s what we want to do, especially with my help and my leadership, people who are black, brown or any other racially minoritized group will see themselves being talked about and addressed and the concerns that they feel that nobody cares about are being represented.”

—Dr. William A. Smith, chief executive administrator for Strategic Initiatives & Mental Health Justice, Huntsman Mental Health Institute; co-founder and executive committee member, U’s Center for Research on Race, Health Justice, and Public Policy