Science is advancing faster than the systems built to evaluate, deliver, and learn from it. TREAT Humanity connects evidence, care, measurement, workforce, policy, and emerging treatments around one fundamental question: What helps people get better, for whom, under what circumstances, and does it last?
Nationally designed. Starting in California.
America does not lack mental health research, promising treatments, skilled clinicians, or public spending. It lacks the infrastructure that connects them. Care often arrives after crisis. Outcomes are measured too narrowly. Data remain fragmented. And what one program learns rarely becomes knowledge the next program can use.
The result is measured not only in suffering, but in emergency care, disability, incarceration, lost productivity, disrupted families, and enormous downstream cost.
Emergency department, 11:47 PM. This is what the absence of infrastructure looks like.
Human wellbeing and fiscal discipline point in the same direction. When systems fail to intervene early, coordinate care, or learn from outcomes, costs migrate downstream into emergency medicine, disability, law enforcement, housing instability, and lost productivity.
The question is not whether society pays. We are already paying. The question is whether we pay for systems that help people recover.
Mental health treatment is not only compassion spending. It is fiscal policy.
RAND's evaluation of Los Angeles County's Full Service Partnerships found $82.9 million in savings associated with five measured outcomes, representing a 24% reduction in non-FSP government spending among participants.
But RAND also identified something important: the available data were not enough. The researchers recommended broader longitudinal measurement, including housing, education, employment, social engagement, meaningful activity, and other outcomes that better describe how people's lives change over time.
The result of late, fragmented care is measured not only in spending, but in suffering, disability, incarceration, lost productivity, disrupted families, and lives constrained by systems that do not learn.
Human wellbeing and fiscal discipline point in the same direction: toward earlier care, continuity, meaningful outcomes, and systems capable of improving.
That is the larger opportunity: not simply to spend more, but to learn more precisely what helps people recover, what does not, and why.
Mental health will not be transformed by one treatment, one dataset, one profession, or one policy. TREAT Humanity works across the layers that determine whether good science becomes better lives.
Mental health reaches far beyond the healthcare system.
Homelessness is the most visible consequence of California's mental health infrastructure failure — but far from the only one. The same broken system touches every community, every income level, and every corner of the state.
One in five California students has a diagnosable mental health condition. Most receive no school-based support. Early intervention produces the highest return of any investment in the system.
Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in working-age adults. Lost productivity and early workforce exit cost California's economy hundreds of billions annually.
Untreated parental mental illness is one of the strongest predictors of child poverty and intergenerational trauma. Systems that reach parents reach the next generation simultaneously.
Inland communities face provider shortages that make care effectively inaccessible. The rural crisis is invisible to urban policymakers — and severe.
California combines world-class research, extraordinary demographic diversity, substantial public investment in mental health, major Medicaid reforms, and a powerful precedent for building public scientific infrastructure.
That makes it an unusually strong place to test new models, measure them rigorously, and build approaches that other communities can adapt rather than simply copy.
California has done this before. As a founding member of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee of CIRM, TREAT's founder helped govern an $8.5 billion public institution that became the largest stem cell research agency in the world. We know how to build institutions that last.
We built national infrastructure. We put humans on the moon. We mapped the human genome. In California, voters created a public agency that has committed billions to move regenerative medicine from discovery toward patients.
None of these efforts succeeded because someone found a single solution. They succeeded because science, institutions, public investment, talent, measurement, and sustained purpose were brought together.
TREAT Humanity is not another treatment program. It is an effort to build the connective architecture through which science, care, public systems, and lived experience can learn from one another and improve over time.
Jeannie Fontana, MD, PhD, is the founder and CEO of TREAT Humanity. Trained in medicine, biochemistry, and molecular biophysics, she has spent decades working at the place where scientific discovery meets the institutions responsible for bringing it to people.
The death of her mother from ALS profoundly shaped her understanding of what happens when human need moves faster than science. Fontana went on to work in patient advocacy, biomedical research, governance, and public policy. She served on the boards of the ALS Association and Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute and was a founding member of the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, California's voter-created stem cell agency, now backed by $8.5 billion in public funding.
Her work now spans mental health, consciousness, psychedelic medicine, outcomes measurement, policy, and the design of systems capable of translating scientific progress into human benefit.
TREAT Humanity grew in part from her work in psychedelic medicine, where extraordinary therapeutic promise revealed a larger problem: innovation is advancing faster than the systems built to evaluate it, deliver it safely, measure what happens afterward, and learn from the results.
“My interest is not in defending any one treatment. It is in building a system capable of learning: what helps, for whom, under what circumstances, and whether the change lasts.”
TREAT Humanity is assembling researchers, clinicians, technologists, policymakers, funders, and people with lived experience around projects that can be tested, measured, challenged, and improved.
Ways to participateAcademic, clinical, and outcomes collaboration
Training, standards, and new models of care
Responsible infrastructure for longitudinal learning
Regulatory, financing, and institutional design
Building systems around the outcomes people themselves value
Supporting rigorous early work that traditional funding often cannot
Early philanthropic support allows TREAT Humanity to develop research partnerships, build measurement infrastructure, convene disciplines that rarely work together, and test new models before they are ready for conventional public or academic funding.
We welcome funders interested in building durable public-good infrastructure rather than supporting a single treatment or program.
Mental health treatment is not only humane policy.
It is fiscal policy. And it is long overdue.
TREAT Humanity · treathumanity.org · jfontana@treathumanity.org