I am Marketing Communications Director for Staglin Family Vineyard and the International Mental Health Research Organization (IMHRO), the nonprofit my family founded. I serve as Webmaster for IMHRO, which enables me to share exciting news with the public about the discoveries made by the scientists we fund. I also direct the scientific symposium portion of IMHRO’s yearly fundraiser, the Staglin Music Festival for Mental Health.

This keeps me in touch with those scientists, whom I greatly admire for their incredible effectiveness and dedication to helping people with mental illness.

Moreover, I love to write, and am uniquely qualified as spokesperson for IMHRO as I live, successfully, with schizophrenia. I have spoken and written publicly about my ultimately positive experience with my condition to help reduce stigma at large for people with mental illness.

The message I try to communicate when I write is that with a loving family’s support, as I am lucky to have, and acceptance of the reality of one’s condition, it is possible to recover from a mental illness and lead a happy and fulfilling life. There should be no shame in living with a mental illness—they are genetically rooted brain disorders. Did you know that 1 in 5 people lives with a brain disorder? I think that the more people who speak out about their condition, the more compassion there will be at large, and the more support there will be for the social, clinical and scientific programs that are making life better for people  with mental illness. It’s a growing movement, and I am proud to be involved in it.

 

For fun, I love to spend time with my wife, hike, bike, read and travel.

 

If you’d like more info about IMHRO, please visit www.imhro.org.