Rosalynn Carter's quiet victory: How she saved thousands and took no credit

PERSONAL ESSAY

“A woman in Georgia” told the world about the mental health disaster in Greece. This is her story

Published December 1, 2023 12:12PM (EST)

Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter posing for a portrait in her back yard to promote her new autobiographical book, “First Lady From Plains”, on April 3, 1984 at the Carter home in Plains, GA. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis liked to talk about the necessity for getting into “good trouble” —the moral duty for good people to go about their lives by comforting the aﬀlicted and aﬀlicting the comfortable — and in that spirit of the human need to seek redemption in a broken world, he had much in common with his friend Rosalynn Carter, who died last week.

While most Americans remember the former first lady for her visible public advocacy for mental health and human rights — including her leadership of President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, which led to passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 — few understood how much she was able to accomplish on that mission by exercising her formidable inﬂuence behind the scenes, leaving credit to others when it meant ensuring that the most vulnerable among us were cared for and protected from harm. I was privileged to watch her quietly work that complicated political room once, though on an international scale, with a profound impact on the lives of thousands of people.

Passing through London’s Heathrow Airport on my way back to Chicago after a conference in Zurich in 1989, I glanced at a copy of the Observer at a news kiosk, the front page bearing a shocking photo of dozens of emaciated men wandering naked in a large room, their heads shaved. It was a lurid scene reminiscent of Auschwitz or a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of hell. The headline on the front page was stark: “Europe’s Guilty Secret: 1,300 Lost Souls Left to Rot!”

The story described the sheer horror of “the naked and the damned … [trapped] in a Greek Bedlam” — hundreds of men, women and children suffering from mental illness or mental disabilities had been dumped into a fetid warehouse-like institution on the Aegean island of Leros, essentially abandoned by their families as well as by the Greek government’s health oﬀicials, who apparently viewed them as citizens who were best forgotten.

It was no secret that the Greek mental health system had been plagued by scandalous conditions in its large public hospitals for decades, prompting unheeded demands for reform from the wider European community and mental health advocates. But the Leros story was about to expose this broken system in a way that could no longer be ignored.

Mrs. Carter and I had worked together on mental health advocacy projects in the past, so when I shared the Observer article with her after returning to Chicago, I figured she would probably ﬁnd a way to remind the world that these forgotten people existed.

She did.

Some months later, Mrs. Carter’s assistant at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta called my oﬀice, suggesting that I watch the upcoming Sunday evening ABC program “20/20,” hosted by Barbara Walters. The broadcast opened with Walters telling viewers that “a woman in Georgia recently alerted us to a horrifying human tragedy going on in Greece.”

Walters went on to narrate shocking scenes ﬁlmed by a special ABC crew sent to Greece to investigate the Leros story, adding that the Greek ambassador to the U.S. had refused to comment when asked about this matter. The George H.W. Bush White House didn’t know what to tell Barbara Walters either, nor did the State Department. Other voices were not so quiet, and in the weeks to come letters of outrage started ﬂowing in, not just to the White House but to the U.N. secretary general, the World Health Organization, even to the Vatican.

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In the end, the humiliated Greek government, its national pride embarrassed by the public exposure of such inhumane conditions, announced that the hospital on Leros would ﬁnally be shut down. What followed was the emergence of a sweeping reform movement that would eventually transition Greece’s broken mental health system into a network of community-based treatment centers and smaller hospitals. The reformers implemented a plan for developing adequately resourced facilities with trained psychiatrists and social workers, the sorts of changes that would bring Greece in line with mental health system transformations that had already occurred in other European countries, as well as the United States.

In her quiet way, Rosalynn Carter contributed to that hopeful outcome on behalf of hundreds of lost souls on a Greek island, taking care that the story would be told not by a former resident of the White House but simply by an anonymous “woman in Georgia.”

The world is a better place today because Rosalynn Carter was a woman who knew how to make good trouble.

Dr. Ronald H. Davidson is the former director of the Mental Health Policy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry. He worked with Rosalynn Carter on mental health advocacy projects in Chicago and at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, including a 1995 interview they recorded together for NPR.