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April brings two important public events for the Alan Hu Foundation, a Pleasanton-based nonprofit founded a handful of years ago from the embers of family grief to help others in their community.
The grassroots foundation has such an important mission: “To promote mental health, raise awareness and remove stigma surrounding psychiatric disorders, and support fundamental research for cures.”
The next installment of the organization’s recurring Mental Health Lecture Series is set for Tuesday (April 9) from 6:30-7:30 p.m. via webinar, featuring Dr. Leanne Williams, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness.
Her presentation – titled “Precision Treatments for Depression: Are We Getting Closer?” – will focus on results from recent trials aimed at understanding which types of depression respond to which interventions, and how the results could be translated into clinical care.
Then, on the ensuing Sunday (April 14), the foundation is holding its “Bridge Over Troubled Water 2” benefit concert, which will see local musicians perform works by Rachmaninoff, Bach and Shostakovich to help raise funds for the nonprofit’s scholarship fund.
The scholarship was created in the memories of its namesake Alan Hu and Sarah Rahman, two people who lost their battles with mental health disorders and died by suicide.
Our retired Tri-Valley Life editor Dolores Fox Ciardelli wrote a memorable profile of the Alan Hu Foundation in 2019, ahead of its inaugural benefit concert, centered on a striking interview with Alan’s mother Xiaofang Chen.
“The journey of growing Alan Hu Foundation and continuously serving our community by providing high quality mental health programs to promote mental health is both gratifying and humbling,” Chen, who serves as the foundation’s president, told me over the weekend. She co-founded the organization with Alan’s father, Chih-Ching Hu.
In the past five years, the foundation has seen more than 4,800 people attend its webinars, asking more than 600 questions during its Q&A sessions, according to Chen. The videos have generated more than 20,000 views online.
“It is gratifying to be able to provide this much-needed knowledge to our community. At the same time, we continue to learn about the sufferings, even casualties, caused by mental illness first hand and realize that there is a long way to go to eradicate them,” she said. “We are hopeful that a better day will come because more and more people are aware of the importance of mental health and are working towards finding cures.”
Through my outreach ahead of the concert, I also learned more from Mark Rahman, the foundation’s treasurer, about his late daughter Sarah.
“She was a sweet and creative child, a piano prodigy who taught herself. She cared throughout her life for the homeless. But she was also different,” Mark Rahman told me. “She was hounded by her own set of demons but nevertheless kept striving to have something like a normal life.”
“We remember her warmth, caring, joy of discovery and how she always made me pay a full 20% tip eating out,” he added. “Everyone who met her loved her, and our pain is that she was the only one who could not see that.”
It’s so inspiring to hear Chen and Rahman talk so openly to us about such tough, deeply personal subjects as they and their supporters work so hard to help others facing similar situations as their children and families did.
Honestly, it’s only in recent years that the journalism world has been more open to reporting about mental health. For decades, even as I came out of J-school, the prevailing wisdom was to avoid coverage of suicide at almost all costs – an industry safeguard against the spectrum of glorification to triggering.
But an unintended consequence was generations of near-silence in the news about a topic pervasive in our communities and its indisputable connection to larger societal issues such as prescription drug use, access to firearms, depictions in popular culture and more modernly, social media.
It is a difficult balance for journalists professionally, let alone personally. Our organization actually has a suicide coverage document to help guide our decision-making for those few situations where a story is ethically necessary. (Generally, it occurs in public or involves a public figure.)
The common thread in our internal guidance is restraint: Report only minimal details and do so with respect for those directly involved and the effects on people at-large.
That’s why I’m only sharing here what we learned from Dublin Police Services about the situation that caught many people’s attention outside an office building on Amador Plaza Road on March 28. An apparent suicide in public was the reason for the large police and fire response there that afternoon.
Nothing more should be reported out about that specific incident, but we did need to do it – not only because of the visible public nature of what transpired, but also to dispel rumors by answering the question.
Where the loosening of coverage constraints in this area has been particularly impactful is sources are becoming more open and direct in stories about how mental health affects them and their loved ones.
Part of journalism’s role is to facilitate discussions on difficult topics, elevating things that would otherwise be missed – or worse ignored. We shouldn’t cast a blind eye to a truth in front of us.
Let’s talk about this. These conversations are so important to have, individually and collectively. I know. Suicide and self-harm ideation has affected my family, people I went to school with, people I’ve worked with.
Resources are available. Locally, nonprofits like the Alan Hu Foundation, Z-Cares Foundation, NAMI Tri-Valley or Discovery Counseling Center provide support on a range of mental health subjects. Medical care providers and private professionals, even when the systems are daunting to navigate, are avenues as well.
And anyone in need of immediate assistance can contact Crisis Support Services of Alameda County’s 24-hour confidential crisis line at 800-309-2131 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
