Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Seth Kahan's Journey Transforms Mental Health Advocacy in America
Mon, 12 May 2025
Send us a textSeth Kahan shares his journey from personal tragedy to leading a national movement against mental health stigma after his mother developed schizophrenia when he was 10 years old. His experience pioneering frameworks for grand challenges led him to launch Stop Stigma Together, a collaborative initiative uniting major mental health organizations to eliminate stigma around mental health and substance use disorders.• Seth's mother developed schizophrenia when he was 10, destroying his family and shaping his future work• The Stop Stigma Together initiative works with major mental health organizations and launched the "Love Your Mind" campaign with the Ad Council• Education works for reducing stigma in children, while adults need to see people like themselves managing mental health challenges• The SSTCommunity website provides free resources and brings together task forces focused on different aspects of mental health stigma• Mental health stigma exists in three dimensions: structural (laws/policies), social (interactions), and personal (private thoughts)• Seth overcame his own internalized stigma toward his mother through cognitive behavioral therapy• Policy work on mental health parity is crucial to ensure insurance companies treat mental health equally to physical health• Finding someone to talk to is the most important first step for anyone struggling with mental health issuesIf you need help with insurance denials for mental health services, visit CoverMyMentalHealth.org for free resources. For mental health crisis response alternatives to police, find local resources at TheRightResponse.co.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: Who is Seth Kahan and what is his background?
Hopefully, you'll gain more awareness, acceptance, and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me? The World, Humanity Over Handcuffs, the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us today is Seth Kahn. He is a renowned strategist and expert tackling complex global challenges.
With a background at the World Bank and extensive experience, he pioneered frameworks for addressing grand challenges to tackle pressing global issues. Known for uniting diverse organizations and driving systematic change, Seth focuses on creating social movements and mobilizing collective action. He has such an incredible story to tell, and we're happy to have him here. Thanks for coming on.
Well, I'm happy to be here. It's definitely an activity of passion of mine, so I appreciate being invited to the show.
It's my pleasure. Glad to have you here. So how did you get started in this?
Chapter 2: How did Seth Kahan's personal experience shape his mental health advocacy?
You and I talked about the grand challenge work that I do, and that's what got me to the mental health work. When I was a kid, when I was 10 years old, my mother developed schizophrenia. It was a game changer for my family. It destroyed my family. It was 1969. My dad didn't know what was going on. It was horrific for me. I was very close to my mother.
She was getting her PhD in special education, which, by the way, she continued to pursue and received as someone who had schizophrenia. She got her PhD. Since it was special education for young kids, I was always the test kid. She dragged me around to all these things that she did. One of the great gifts my mother gave me was that I associate taking tests with my mother's love.
So I have loved tests through high school and college. It did me, it was a great boon. I mean, you know, I was always ready to take the test. Gotten so close to her because of this relationship with her PhD. And then suddenly she was gone and she was paranoid. She thought people were following us. Thought people were pumping gas into our apartment at night.
She had audio hallucinations, visual hallucinations. So for a 10-year-old, it was like the person I depended on to interpret the world for me was suddenly completely checked out. It was terrifying for me. My family fell apart. I moved out of the house at 16, was unsupervised through all my early adulthood. I never went back to my home. I never felt like my family's home was my home.
When I moved out, that was it. Luckily, my mother got good meds in the 90s, and we had a really good relationship for the last eight years of her life. That seminal event, of course, is something I carry with me. It's part of my identity, part of who I am. Fast forward, I'm doing these grand challenges, big, bold goals that take on intractable issues.
I get a referral to the CEO of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute because he wants to eliminate stigma across the country for all Americans, all 350 million Americans. Because of my own background, I said, well, I'll work with you pro bono and I'll show you how to do this. So we met once a week for an hour a week for about a year. And then he invited me to lead the initiative.
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Chapter 3: What is the Stop Stigma Together initiative and its goals?
I had never led a grand challenge. I always support CEOs who lead grand challenges. Because of my background, I said yes. That was about four years ago. It's been one of the best choices of my life. So I'm the lead for Stop Stigma Together to eliminate the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders on a national scale.
We work with all the major mental health organizations, a lot of little ones as well. We work with the Ad Council. We have a seven-year campaign going, and we're helping them to raise money to make it longer. The campaign is called Love Your Mind, and I can talk about that. I hope that Love Your Mind will become like Smokey the Bear. It'll just be part of American culture. That's what my goal is.
I think that's a great goal. Now, you used the word challenge. I think that's the perfect word. When you start these grand challenges, what are some of the challenges that you have to face?
Well, the first thing is that you have to pull all the movers and shakers in a particular space together face-to-face, not Zoom. And after the pandemic, that's a challenge because everybody's busy. Everybody's like, I'll give you an hour, but, you know, you want me to get on a plane and fly to a city and spend a night? And it's like the thing that was gratifying was that all of these people.
So we're talking about the executive directors of, you know, American Psychiatric, American Psychological Association, NAMI, all these big organizations. They all work. understood why stigma has to be defeated. And they all had initiatives to fight stigma. And they all felt like they were kind of at the end of what they could do on their own. It was a known topic.
It had been around for a long time. Everybody was frustrated. And then suddenly mental health was popping up on the national conversation. Simone Biles, COVID, all of these things exacerbated the stress people were experiencing or made them feel like they could talk about it. If Simone Biles can talk about it, I can talk about it.
We started seeing mental health on the front page of all these newspapers all the time. So that challenge to bring them, to get them to schedule that time and show up was something we were able to overcome. And we had an amazing meeting in April of 22 with all these leaders. So that was the first challenge.
The big challenge I had was when I first started my podcast, I knew absolutely nothing about autism or mental health. If I heard the words on TV or radio, I just had my perception of what it is. I was totally wrong. Now after doing this, I realize that education, understanding is the key to erasing the stigma. A big part of my learning is because of this podcast.
Not everybody gets the information like I do unless they're dealing with it on a daily basis. Then they have no choice. If someone sees a person having a psychotic event, they don't understand this person might do something bad, but ultimately they're really not a bad person. It's their mind that's telling them things that they don't understand.
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Chapter 4: What challenges arise when uniting leaders in mental health advocacy?
But if I saw an ad for a 65-year-old white guy who worked as a consultant and he was dealing with alcohol use disorder or schizophrenia or bipolar, I'd watch that closely and I would be thinking, that could be me. That could be my friend. And all of a sudden, I'm having a different kind of experience. And we find that that decreases stigma with adults.
If they can meet someone and have a positive experience, then that starts to change the way they think about things. There's one thing I just wanted to throw in here.
You mentioned, you know, if someone has a psychotic episode, there's an organization that I've just become aware of in the United States called The Right Response, where you can go and get a directory of who to call that's not a police officer if you know of somebody who's having a psychotic episode. And you can find it on the web at therightresponse.co. Just go there and there's a directory.
You can look up your area. I think it's a great service that they're providing. It's free. It'll route you to someone you can call.
Yes, that's a great resource. One of the most common issues I hear is police do not have enough training. So when they come into a situation with someone that's autistic or having a psychotic event, sometimes things can get out of control when they really just don't need to.
It's easy for me to understand because, I mean, having grown up with my mom, I mean, she would have meltdowns regularly. And if you haven't been trained and you don't know what's going on, it's scared the hell out of you. If your job is to protect people, then you fall back on what you know how to do. I had a close friend who worked at St.
Elizabeth's, which is a hospital here in Washington, D.C., that takes care of the seriously mentally ill. And he was assigned to the people who are known to be violent. He said, you know, when we have someone acting out inside the hospital, we got these two big guys and we got these huge pillows.
And these big guys will like sandwich them with a pillow, basically making sure that they don't harm themselves or anyone else until it's over. And I thought, boy, that's the way we should be doing it, right? It's like, just be gentle. Just care for these people. They're in trouble. Help them get through it.
I love that story. That is just a great way of handling it. I had a CIT trainer on. He told me a story that really tells it all about police. In some cases, they only have seconds to react. He uses this one video that shows this policeman that did everything by the book. Everything he did was absolutely correct, except this one time. He came in contact with a young man that he thought was high.
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Chapter 5: How can education and representation reduce mental health stigma?
Earlier, we were talking about an online program that you were developing. Can you expand on what it is, what it entails, and what your hopes are for it?
So we're building a community. We have an online website called sst.community. Anybody can go to it just by typing those into the browser, sst, for Stop Stigma Together, .community. There's no fee involved. You just register and you're in. And we're sharing resources there. We're sharing resources, and we have different task forces.
We have one in criminal justice, where I've gotten my education around the kinds of things we're talking about. We have one for children, youth, and family. We have one for policy. I've never been into policy my whole life. Now I'm into it because I want to see mental health get the right policy changes. We have it for rural.
Rural is where some of the highest incidents of suicide take place in our country. And there's other issues around isolation that come in. Workplace. We have a partnership with OSHA. They believe that a safe workplace is one that's mentally healthy, not just physically safe. So we're working with them and other organizations
like One Mind at Work, which is a great organization that produces a lot of content that workplaces can use, as well as a report card. If a workplace wants to do the right thing, but they don't know what that is, they can go and get assistance from One Mind at Work. So we have all these different task forces that are involved in this activity. Then we share resources.
We have people working together Looking at some of the other task forces, we have one on substance use disorders. We have one on marginalized communities. We have one on journalism where we're teaching journalists how to write about mental health so that they don't spread misinformation. We have one on entertainment media because in Hollywood,
They're interested in representing mental health and substance use disorders accurately, and they don't have necessary information. They don't work with mental health specialists.
So we have a bridge, and we have people who actually will spend time with a writer or a showrunner or a producer or an actor and help them with what they're trying to create so that they do a good job of portraying the challenges.
That's a lot of great information. When you start a grand challenge, what's your process?
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Chapter 6: What resources exist for mental health crisis responses without police involvement?
It's not always intuitive. For example, another grand challenge I worked on is Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation to improve the health of America's nurses. The U.S. Army got involved because they saw the health of nurses as a national security threat. They said, if we can't take care of our warriors, then that's a challenge for us as a country. I never would have guessed that. Never.
Nurse health being a national security threat? I just didn't understand that. We had Harvard Medical School get involved because they were doing the largest study of nurses' health, and they only had 8,000 nurses, and we were going after 4 million. They said, if you'll give us your data, we'll crunch it. And that was huge for us.
I never would have thought about a partnership with Harvard Medical School. So you try and pick a vision, and for us, it was stigma-free United States. That everybody's invested in because you're going to ask them to do work and you're not going to pay them for the work. It has to feel like they're moving the needle on their own goals, their own mission. So that's the first step.
Then you involve them in creating a national strategy. So I got all these leaders together as they delegated staff. We built out how are we going to do this? And then we have another event. that's open to even more people. We have 300 people at this event. And we ask them to kick the tires. Look at our strategy. What's weak? Tell us where we're going to fail before we start executing it.
And of course, we're enrolling people in that process too, because if they're involved in criticizing our strategy, then maybe they'll be interested in implementing the improved version. And that's what happens. So it's very participatory, kind of like kneading bread. You're always folding people back into it.
It can be a challenge for some organizations because they want to move fast and they want to do that by telling other people what to do. And that drops participation. So you need to increase participation. That's the key.
I think one of the most important things you said, it takes time. It won't happen overnight. With that said, what kind of time frame do you have in order to get the results that you're looking for?
Well, with the stigma initiative, I found this book, which I will read to you. This is available for free over the web. It's from the National Academies, and it's called Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders, published in 2016. And it said it's going to take about 20 years to do this. I got the timeline from this book.
But not all grand challenges are the same. So other grand challenges have different timelines. But for this one, we're talking about legislative change and changing the minds of Americans all over the place. People who are informed, people who are not informed, people who are highly educated, people who have no education, people who live in cities, people who live on farms.
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Chapter 7: How does Stop Stigma Together build community and task forces online?
How are people interacting with each other? Anywhere people interact. In their home? In a shopping mall? In a church? Anywhere. What are the rules for talking about mental health challenges? That's easy to see because you can see it in people's behavior and you can document it and you can give people report cards and they can adjust their behavior. But then the third dimension is not easy to see.
And that's what happens in the privacy of your own mind and how you think about it. And that has to be dealt with. So I'll give you a personal story for that. When my mother was near the end of her life, she was on meds for her schizophrenia and she was doing very well. However, I still felt embarrassed by her because that is something that I had in my mind since I was 10 years old.
Now we're talking about me being 45 years old. I still have it. I remember a dinner in my house with my father-in-law and his partner and my mother and my wife. My mother was holding her own in the conversation, she was very smart, but her hair was a little funky and she'd spill stuff on her blouse and she wouldn't clean it up. I was humiliated by her.
That was all happening in the privacy of my own mind. My father-in-law and the woman who was his partner loved my mother. They even told me afterwards. They just enjoyed the conversation so much they loved to meet my mom. And my wife didn't have any issues with her. Only me in private was having an issue.
And so I actually took that into my own therapy because I felt like those thoughts about my mother were actually preventing me from loving her as much as I wanted to. That's an example of you have to go inside and ask yourself, how am I thinking about someone who has a mental health challenge?
Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. I appreciate you telling that story. It's a very personal one. Were you able to get past that so you could look at your mother the way that you hope to?
Yeah, I did with the help of my therapist who really helped me to examine my thoughts and think about things in different ways and address some of the embarrassment that I felt directly, you know?
I think that's really good. You was able to get past that so you could move forward with your life. Now, if you don't mind me asking, how did you get past that? I mean, this was embedded in your mind for a very long time. How did you find that change so that you could breathe and move forward?
Well, I had a lot of success with cognitive behavior therapy, CBT. And one of the things that that does is it asks you to examine your thinking and identify mistakes that you're making in your own thinking, like overgeneralization or black and white thinking. My mother's either healthy or she's not healthy. She's either good or she's bad.
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Chapter 8: What is the process and timeline for launching a successful grand challenge?
Even if the stains are a symptom of her schizophrenia, the truth is, is that I love my mother deeply, and she gave me many gifts, and I can appreciate her when I'm with her. I can actively appreciate her when I'm with her.
Yeah, that's just really nice to say. I think this story is just so good. It's one that a lot of people can relate to. Hopefully this story will resonate with people and it can help them as well.
Right. Yeah.
Now, you've started this grand challenge. It's been going about four years now. What do you see in the next five years? Let's not go 20. What do you see happening to help you get towards that goal you're trying to accomplish?
I see a couple of things. One is that I see some kind of activity that spreads around the United States that's like storytelling and story listening. where people have an opportunity to be candid and honest with each other in caring ways about the people in their lives who have challenges with their mental health. That's everything from mild anxiety all the way up to serious mental illness, right?
It's everything from brain conditions where the person is perfectly healthy, like many of the folks who have autism, to people who have a brain that is in need of something. It's an imbalance in there, like my mother's schizophrenia. She did really well with medication.
So it's like I see some kind of an activity that's engaging, that's participatory, that's fun, where people have a chance to talk about their mental health and that spreads. So it becomes almost like in the old days, they call it a parlor game. It's like something you do with people, right? When my kids were little, we were trying to occupy them in the car.
We'd play this game where, like, you say a word, and your word has to begin with the letter my word ended with. So if I say fight, you could say together. Then I might say rat, and then you might say tomorrow. You know, and it just keeps going like that. But what if it was a game that was about mental health that was that fun, that easy, And that lowered the anxiety or stress around challenges.
To me, that would get traction on the ground, in living rooms, in scout troops, in community centers, you know.
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