The Saks Institute Spring 2015 Symposium was held on Monday, March 30th at the USC Town & Gown Ballroom in Los Angeles. The Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics is a think tank founded to foster interdisciplinary and collaborative research among scholars and policymakers around issues of mental illness and mental health. As a research institute, the goal is to study issues at the intersection of law, mental health, and ethics as well as influence policy reform and advocacy actions for improved treatment of people with mental illness. Professor Saks was a 2009 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship and in fall 2010 announced that she was using funds from the “genius grant” to create the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics. The Institute spotlights one important mental health issue per academic year and is a collaborative effort that includes faculty from seven USC departments: law, psychiatry, psychology, social work, gerontology, philosophy and engineering.
The Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care supports this symposium through our Dr. Dean Brooks Fund and the Dorothea Dix Think Tank. Originally organized to support decriminalizing mental illness, which was the topic of the first year of the Saks Institute, the Dean Brooks Fund expanded to support conversations at the Saks Institute to help the mental health law field move in this direction. While we supported the conversations on decriminalizing mental illness in the past, the fund advisors felt like campus mental health was also an important topic.
This year’s spring symposium focused on Mental Health on Campus, from Admission to Graduation: Keys to Success for University, Community College, and Veteran Students. You can see the videos and slides of the speakers at http://weblaw.usc.edu/who/faculty/conferences/saks-symposium/index.cfm. One of the highlights was the specific attention to supportive policies for leaves and returns to class from Julia Graff of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and the focused discussions on helping veterans and military families.
Held twice a year in the fall and spring, past speakers have included Patrick Kennedy, who sponsored the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008; Nadine J. Kaslow, PhD, ABPP, President of the American Psychological Association; Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the American Psychiatric Association; Richard Bonnie, JD, Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy; Marvin Southard, DSW, Los Angeles County Mental Health Director, and Judge Steven Leifman, JD, 11th Circuit Court, Miami.
