A Dream Come True: A New Welcoming Environment for Children, Teens, and Young Adults to Receive Mental Health Services

It is a dream come true to see the near-opening of the Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry building, after two decades of collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco.

I’ve spent my life advocating for the health and well-being of children, teens and young adults. I grew up with a close family member who experienced significant depression due to suffering multiple miscarriages, which impacted my family. This experience informed my decision to study dance therapy in college.  From that moment on, I knew that my life’s work had been found. Among my most vivid experiences were volunteering on the family crisis intervention hotline at Safe & Sound, and then with a clinical and research team at San Francisco General Hospital’s Child & Adolescent Psych Services Department in 2003-2004.  These experiences shaped my views on the importance of access to mental health care, particularly for children and teens from marginalized populations, and drove my vision for this partnership with UCSF.

Early on at San Francisco General Hospital, I witnessed patients receiving the best of care in public health, but I also saw traumatized children and teens navigating a foreboding physical environment; small children waited for psychiatric care seated in old, cramped, poorly lit spaces. It was sometimes chaotic and scary to children who had been previously traumatized.  

Experiences like that reinforced my commitment to understand childhood trauma research, and to support the experts in any way possible. It also sparked my vision for a safe and beautiful environment where children, teens and families could receive mental health services. I am so proud that this new building is that vision, turned reality! The Child, Teen and Family Center will have a separate, welcoming entrance, ensuring patients feel safe and comfortable and know they will be treated with deep respect and care.

My concern for child and adolescent health has heightened by recent events and the pandemic.  A year of political uncertainty globally and at home, deep social divisions, social isolation and Covid has had an adverse impact on everyone’s mental health. For children, whose very development relies on a sense of safety, continuity, and vital connections with other children, this year has been particularly devastating. The effect has been profound and it will take time to help children and families recover.

Simply being able to imagine one’s future as having limitless potential is critical to a child’s health and development. I am passionate about ensuring equal access and dignified treatment for children, teens, young adults and families because I want everyone to be able to participate fully in society. Ensuring that the needs of the most marginalized are met through trauma-informed services is one critical step forward.  That is why destigmatizing mental health and creating a welcoming space for care in this beautiful new building is a wonderful achievement and so incredibly timely.

I am proud that the new building will bear the name of my former sister-in-law, Nancy. My greatest hope is that naming this building in Nancy’s memory will help those who struggle with mental health feel safe and secure in seeking out support, and that we will simultaneously advance critical research and innovations in mental health while serving the immediate needs of our entire community.  

Touring the new Nancy Friend Pritzker Building