Liam Price | The Observer A gift of an anonymous but “transformative” amount from multiple Veldman family foundations is set to significantly increase access to mental health care for the South Bend area.
The benefactor foundations include those of Sharon and Matt Edmonds, Connie and Mike Joines and Anita and Tom Veldman. Their gift, according to a Notre Dame news release, will be used to establish the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, honoring the benefactors’ parents.
“Given our mission to be a force for good in the world, Notre Dame has the opportunity to develop new models for the provision of mental health services and undertake groundbreaking research on how to treat mental illnesses, while also enhancing services for our students and helping to meet the overwhelming demand for more mental health resources in our local community,” University President Fr. John Jenkins said in the release. “We are deeply grateful to the Veldman family for their support as we seek to bring hope and healing to those struggling with mental illness and build healthier and more compassionate communities.”
Sarah Mustillo, the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, said the gift comes at a time when mental health care is important nationwide, but it is particularly inaccessible to those living in the South Bend area.
“Mental health issues in the United States are in epidemic proportions right now … 70% of Americans have better access to mental health care than we do here in this region,” Mustillo said in a video interview. “And there are tremendous organizations providing care to people in this region, but we just can’t keep up with the demand, so we are hoping to increase the supply.”
The increase in care availability, Mustillo said, will be significant, as new faculty members will be endowed by the Veldman family’s gift, opening up opportunities for graduate students in Notre Dame’s psychology department to participate in clinical research.
“We will be able to provide services to more than 1500 people who don’t currently have access to care right now through our graduate student clinicians-in-training and then also through our faculty members,” Mustillo said.
The Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will combine the work of Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families and the Suicide Prevention Initiative—Research, Intervention and Training (SPIRIT) into one building, including a new substance use initiative. These initiatives will move into a new building at the site of Notre Dame’s existing Psychological Services Center on Hill Street in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood, about a mile from campus.
According to Mustillo, the combination of different forms of mental health care into one building is due to the overlap between separate mental health diagnoses, and it will allow Notre Dame researchers to more effectively combat several overlapping mental health problems at once.
“The old model of care was kind of treating individual types of diagnoses, like anxiety or depression, and now we know how much co-morbidity there is, how much these things overlap. We are bringing together trauma, and substance use, and suicide prevention kind of under one roof to treat these things together,” Mustillo said. “And in bringing together faculty members that study these things, we are intending to work with care providers in the region to really elevate care and partner with other organizations in the community.”
Ellen Kirol, the academic advancement director for the College of Arts and Letters, said the location was purposefully placed within accessible distance of South Bend residents.
“We’re building this clinic off-campus because we wanted it to still be not too far from campus, accessible to students and faculty who do research there, or if students want to access it, but it’s intentionally situated within the community because that’s the key focus of their efforts,” Kirol said.
While the amount of the Veldman family’s gift remains anonymous, Kirol said it was “transformative” for what Notre Dame has been hoping to achieve in expanding local access to mental health care.
“Notre Dame feels like we have a great responsibility, that South Bend should benefit from being in the backyard of a top research institution,” Kirol said. “So we want to make sure that we’re making South Bend better, and increasing that level of care by leveraging the talent in our psychology department and building upon that.”
There is currently no exact timeline for the project, according to Kirol, but she expects the project to break ground in the summer of this year.
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