Gift to create mental health program at Ohio State personal for Schottenstein family

The new mental-health initiative at Ohio State University — the Jeffrey Schottenstein Program for Resilience — is deeply meaningful to its namesake.

The university announced Tuesday that the Jay & Jeanie Schottenstein Family Foundation (named after Jeffrey’s parents) has pledged $10.15 million to create the program.

It stems, Jeffrey said in an email interview, from the anxiety and depression he experienced as a teenager — problems that increased when he attended Ohio State as a freshman in 2003.

Back then, he wrote, there were no resources on campus to help him. And nobody talked about mental health issues.

“I put my name on this program because it has taken me a long time not to feel ashamed myself,” wrote Schottenstein, 36, a Downtown resident. “It’s intensely personal to me that we not whisper about mental health or treat people struggling with it like they are invisible or anonymous. 

“More than anything, I want students to know they are not alone, and that dealing with a mental health challenge is not something to be ashamed of.”

'I was not living; I was just surviving':Pandemic's mental health effects magnified by race, poverty

The money will be used in a variety of ways: To fund a marketing campaign to fight against the stigma of mental-health issues, to pay for more therapists and peer counseling on campus, and to fund research into the brain and ways in which cognitive and emotional healing can occur.

And that healing underscores why it was important to Schottenstein that the word, “resilience” was in the program’s title.

“Resilience means being able to find your way back to your core self,” wrote Schottenstein, the founder and CEO of TACKMA, a Columbus menswear company. “It doesn’t mean learning to smile and whistle all the time and pretend you’re fine. It means understanding your feelings, your chemistry and your personal wiring and having the tools to know when those things are, A, out of whack, and, B, how to reset them. 

“Sometimes we can do it ourselves. Sometimes we need help. But those skills are absolutely essential to living a healthy life.”

Schottenstein said initial discussions about a gift began in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and the resulting new emphasis on addressing mental-health issues “reignited” the need to do something.

On Oct. 30 during the Ohio State-Penn State football game, Jeffrey, Jay and Jeanie presented an oversized check to Dr. K. Luan Phan, chair of OSU’s department of psychiatry and behavioral health, who will lead the new program.

Jeffrey Schottenstein’s tweet of that ceremony was re-tweeted by NBA star LeBron James, and James commented, “Love you Jeffrey!”

In the OSU release, university president Kristina M. Johnson called combating the stigma of mental illness, “critically important work, and I thank the Schottensteins for helping make it possible.” 

Phan also said he was grateful for the gift, noting that mental health programs have not typically attracted the attention of major donors.

“Most philanthropists give to the arts,” Phan said. “Or if they think about the health care system, it’s about cancer or maybe heart disease. Mental health is very underfunded.”

In addition to the new programs, research and support systems the money will fund, Phan said the program will sponsor a statewide study called SOAR (State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience), which he hopes will help researchers come up with, “actionable, modifiable risk factors that we don’t have in mental health,” he said.

He compared that to a famous study on heart disease, started in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts, in which several generations of people were followed for years and which formed the basis for learning that smoking, high cholesterol and lack of exercise were major risk factors.

Prevention, he said, has not been emphasized when it comes to battling mental health problems.

“By the time you elevate to having a mental health problem, it’s almost too late,” Phan said. “We have to start to do things much earlier, much more upstream.”

Schottenstein said he was excited about the program’s potential.

“Dr. Phan is the medical expert – and there’s nobody better,” he wrote, “but this is very personal, and it’s been rewarding to be working alongside him to provide the practical guidance that builds this program into something every student at Ohio State feels comfortable taking advantage of to help them live a healthy life.”

kgordon@dispatch.com

@kgdispatch