By building the infrastructure, standards, and systems that allow mental health science to reach every person who needs it — starting in California.
This is not a values argument. It is a math problem. Every dollar not spent on coordinated mental health care gets spent downstream — in emergency rooms, ambulances, jails, shelters, and lost economic productivity. The question is not whether we pay. We are already paying.
Emergency department, 11:47 PM. This is what the absence of infrastructure looks like.
In today's polarized environment, mental health gets framed as a values debate. It is not. Every dollar California does not spend on coordinated care gets spent downstream — in emergency rooms, jails, shelters, and lost workforce productivity.
The question is not whether we pay. We are already paying. The question is whether we pay in ways that work.
"A society is judged not by how it responds to crises, but by how rarely it allows crises to happen."
Conservatives see: reduced government spending, lower incarceration costs, stronger workforce, less dependency on public systems.
Progressives see: equity, trauma-informed care, reduced criminalization of illness, community health and dignity.
Business leaders see: workforce productivity, lower insurance costs, stronger communities.
This is not a partisan issue dressed up as bipartisan. The evidence genuinely supports all three frameworks — because good infrastructure works for everyone.
RAND's evaluation of California's Full Service Partnership found $82.9 million in government savings and a 24% reduction in overall public costs — without creating new entitlement programs, using existing funding streams.
CalAIM already provides the financing mechanism. The science is advancing. What has been missing is the institutional infrastructure to coordinate it all at scale. That is what TREAT builds.
Each pillar addresses a specific, documented failure in the current system. Together they form the architecture of a mental health infrastructure that can actually deliver on its promises — to patients, practitioners, policymakers, and the public.
"My patients don't lack will. They lack access to systems that could actually help them. We've known what works for decades. The infrastructure to deliver it — that's what's missing."
"We're not equipped to be the mental health system. But that's what we've become. Every call is one the system failed to prevent."
"There was no one to call. The nearest psychiatrist had a six-month wait. My son ended up in the ER three times before anyone treated the actual problem."
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 during childhood produces the highest return of any investment in the system.
Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in working-age adults. Lost productivity, absenteeism, 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 and agricultural regions face provider shortages that make care effectively inaccessible. The rural crisis is invisible to urban policymakers — and severe.
California has the largest mental health budget, the most advanced Medicaid infrastructure, the CIRM precedent, and the most visible crisis in the nation. It is the right proving ground — and what works here can scale nationally.
California has done this before. As a founding member of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, 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 the interstate highway system. We put humans on the moon. We mapped the human genome. We created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine — a citizen-driven institution that became the largest public funder of stem cell research in the world.
When this country focuses on a hard problem with the right institutional design and sustained commitment, it delivers. Mental health infrastructure is not more complex than any of those challenges. It has simply never received the same focused investment.
TREAT Humanity is the beginning of that focus — the early architecture of a public institution built to last, built to measure, and built to work for every person who needs care.
Jeannie Fontana, MD, PhD, watched her mother fight and die from ALS. That loss became a compass. Everything that followed traces back to that moment and the conviction it forged: four decades of building the research institutions, governing structures, and public systems that allow science to reach people who need it.
She served on the Board of Trustees of the ALS Association and Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute, and as Vice President of the Board of the American College of Regenerative Medicine. As a founding member of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, she helped construct the public infrastructure for regenerative medicine in America, governing an $8.5 billion institution that became the largest stem cell research agency in the world.
Her career is not a collection of roles. It is a coherent project: repeated movement toward infrastructure-level influence in medicine, science, policy, and public health.
She founded TREAT Humanity to bring that same discipline to mental health and wellbeing, for the generation of people who cannot wait another decade for the systems to catch up to the science.
Building infrastructure of this scale requires more than funding. It requires researchers, clinicians, policy advocates, and communicators who believe the moment is now. There are many ways to be part of this work.
For those ready to invest: the first meaningful philanthropic commitments are the ones that determine whether this gets built. Early donors are not supporters — they are founders.
Ways to participateAcademic and clinical collaboration
Working with legislators and regulators
Practitioners committed to this work
Organizational and community allies
One region, story collection, narrative research
Statewide stakeholder alignment
Professional focus groups and statewide baseline poll
Statewide listening, coalition, and digital engagement
Shapes the institution from its very first days
Mental health treatment is not only humane policy.
It is fiscal policy. And it is long overdue.
TREAT Humanity · treathumanity.org
