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Colts' Irsay family donates $3M to create mental health research center at IU

Indianapolis Star - 12/8/2021

Colts owner Jim Irsay has said he wants to take steps to combat mental illness in the post-pandemic world. Now he's putting more of those words into action.

The Irsay family will give $3 million dollars to Indiana University to establish a new research center on mental health, it was announced Wednesday. The center will be called the Irsay Family Research Institute and will be set up in Morrison Hall on the campus in Bloomington. The IU trustees recently approved renovations for the space.

The center's primary objectives will include the development of health care researchers, studies on the intersection of medicine and socioeconomics and raising awareness locally and nationally about mental health and the attached stigmas. It will be led by Bernice Pescosolido, an IU sociology professor and a nationally recognized scholar in mental health stigma research.

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The gift from the Irsay family is part of their Kicking the Stigma initiative, an initiative Irsay created to help tackle the topic of mental health on the heels of a difficult and isolating pandemic. He's engineered the voices of Colts players such as linebacker Darius Leonard and cornerback Kenny Moore II.

Moore, who has aided the efforts by speaking openly about his anxiety, won the team's Walter Payton Man of the Year Award on Tuesday.

"The stigma surrounding mental health is a matter of life and death, and we must do everything possible to lessen that stigma and remove this obstacle to people getting the help they need," Irsay said in a news release.

According to Pescosolido, there is a "dire need" for more mental health care workers. An important part of the new institute will be to increase the number of graduates trained in mental health fields.

"We know that there is a real need to send different messages regarding the importance of psychiatry, the importance of being a mental health-trained social worker, and even having peer-to-peer supporters for issues that surround mental health," Pescosolido said in a virtual news conference Wednesday.

Further goals include raising awareness, supporting research and informing mental health policymaking.

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Although the coronavirus pandemic has elevated preexisting mental health concerns, leaders from IU and the Irsay family insist this institute would have been established either way.

"We planned on this being an initiative of ours before COVID," said Kalen Jackson, Colts vice chair and one of the owners. "The need was here before. I think it's exacerbated and become more in the forefront. ... I think that COVID really enabled some people to connect with this topic in a new way, because they might have been experiencing a form of mental health (illness) for the very first time."

According to IU President Pamela Whitten, the Irsay family's gift and the establishment of the research institute are important steps in recognizing and combatting stigma. "What I'm excited about is the recognition that this truly is such a significant, serious problem," she said.

"Everybody knows now we're not exaggerating, we're not crying wolf," Whitten said. "This is truly an issue that we must address and we must address together."

While researchers will not move into their Morrison Hall location until January 2023, Pescosolido said the institute's work is already underway, with more than a dozen researchers and multiple campuses involved.

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

Contact Patrick McGerr at pmcgerr@heraldt.com, 812-345-7559, or follow @patrickmcgerr on Twitter.

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