Momentum building in Marquette president's call to tackle trauma epidemic in Milwaukee

Citing dire new statewide data on depression and suicide, the president of Marquette University said Tuesday he’s received strong support for creating a cutting-edge effort to address neurological trauma, increasingly seen as the root cause of a host of social and economic ills.

More than two dozen community organizations have expressed interest in the effort, along with 18 academics. And a wide range of community activists have been attending meetings to learn more and plant the seeds of collaboration.

“There's tremendous interest in the community,” Mike Lovell said. 

Lovell wants to organize a major conference in late September, bring together as many national trauma researchers and local activists as possible, maybe even rent the new Milwaukee Bucks arena as a venue. 

"This has got to get really big," said Franklin Cumberbatch, a member of Lovell's steering committee and executive at Milwaukee-based Bader Philanthropies.

Lovell's initiative is based on the recent recognition that many of the region’s entrenched problems are rooted in trauma — which exists on an epidemic level in Milwaukee. Children in some neighborhoods routinely are exposed to homicide, neglect, abuse, violence, incarceration, hunger, alcohol and drugs, as well as gunfire and police sirens. Data also show identical levels of trauma and its lifelong afflictions in suburbs and rural areas. 

The experience leaves them, as adults, struggling to hold a job and maintain productive relationships. They often deal with mental health issues and contemplate suicide. Without addressing the trauma — without asking what happened in their past and helping them build up resilience — standard jobs programs and educational efforts are all but doomed.

“There’s no health without mental health,” said Pete Carlson, president of the Psychiatric Hospital and Behavioral Health division of Aurora Health Care. 

In early March, Lovell announced his “President’s Challenge” to bring together an unprecedented range of collaborators: social agencies, foundations, courts, universities, churches and hospitals, as well as his own faculty and as many mental health clinicians, therapists, counselors and trauma-informed caregivers as he can convene.

Lovell calls it a "collective impact" approach.

On Tuesday, he convened a SWIM meeting — the acronym stands for Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee — which he has done several times since January. Representatives from a broad spectrum of organizations attended; Lovell, as he has at the other meetings, presided.

A hallmark of the meetings is that people meet each other for the first time, even though they ostensibly work toward the same goals. Cumberbatch called it tearing down the silos.

“We have experts in so many areas, but until we can find a way to get us all to work together in aggregate, we might be the best at what we do, but we won’t move the needle,” Lovell said. “The only way we will move the needle is with cross-sector collaboration.”

To drive home the importance of the effort, Lovell cited a raft of data:

• Wisconsin ranks 47th of 50 states in youth with at least one major depressive episode the past year, ahead of Rhode Island, Indiana and Oregon, according to Mental Health America, a national nonprofit advocacy and research group. Citing its State of Mental Health in America 2018 report, which is based on 2015 data.
• Wisconsin ranks 49th out of 50 states — ahead of only Tennessee — in terms of youth with at least one major depressive episode in the past year who did not receive mental health services, also according to Mental Health America.
• Wisconsin has 3.4 suicides per 1,000 population, compared with a national average of 2.4 per 1,000, Lovell said.
• In Wisconsin, 7.1 of every 1,000 youth experience an inpatient mental health hospitalization, far higher than the national average of 1.6 per 1,000, Lovell said.

“We are currently failing our youth here in Milwaukee, and that does not diminish the work we are doing here in Milwaukee,” Lovell said.

In order to coax a broad and inclusive grassroots response from the community, Lovell said his challenge is vague and inclusive by design.  Marquette is working in partnership with the Johnson Controls Foundation to provide a $250,000, two-year grant for one interdisciplinary collaboration, which “seeks to change the trajectory of lives in our community by addressing one or more of the critical areas in which neighborhood inequities exist, including health, education, safety, housing, transportation and economic prosperity.”

Summing up the Lovell initiative, Terri Strodthoff, executive director of the Alma Center Inc., a nonprofit that aims to break the cycle of domestic violence in Milwaukee families, said: "This is about healing people."

Marquette is crowdsourcing ideas through a President's Challenge website, which accepts proposals and feedback. To date, 30 community organizations and 18 Marquette faculty have expressed interest or submitted ideas, said Dan Bergen, head of Marquette’s Office of Community Engagement. More than 100 community activists attended four separate meetings held at four different community centers, known as settlement houses, Bergen said.

“We will only fund one idea,” but the hope is competition and the new dialogue will catalyze a raft of new collaborations, Bergen told the Tuesday meeting. Final proposals are due at the end of September, but the university wants to begin building teams and formalizing ideas before then.

"We have to be grassroots from the bottom up, not the top down," said Lovell's wife, Amy, who founded an advocacy group for youth mental health, called REDgen, following a spate of youth suicides in the city’s northern suburbs in 2013. The Lovells have worked together on the initiative. 

Last year the Journal Sentinel published a multimedia series, "A Time to Heal," which documented how trauma was the core problem for many people who struggle with depression, mental illness, suicide, an inability to find and hold a job, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress that often are similar to that seen in military veterans. 

SPECIAL REPORT:  A Time to Heal

The series, reported through a fellowship from the Marquette Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of life. What’s more, the series showed that trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing — and passed down from one generation to the next.

At Tuesday's meeting, participants were asked to imagine they live in the year 2023 and that Milwaukee has "become a national leader in addressing trauma in the community." They were asked to write short essays on Milwaukee's new leadership role as other parts of the nation struggle with violence, opiates and other drug use and unemployment."

The idea was to imagine that Milwaukee has the "answers to create healing and safety."