One Organization’s Focus on Mental Health in Rural America: Reducing Stigma and Increasing Access to Care for a Population Defined by Its Resilience - MilkeN Institute
Milken Institute Health continues to work with employers across sectors and industries to advance public health priorities. This interview series is part of the Employer Action Exchange, which highlights ways to accelerate turning evidence into action that impacts employees, communities, and businesses. Employers are a community and a critical contributor to advancing public health priorities that protect, support, and advance people, communities, and businesses.
In 2025, Executive Insights is focused on how employers invest in mitigating risk and building resilience for employees, communities, and their business or mission. Sabrina Spitaletta, senior director, Public Health at the Milken Institute, and Jeff Winton, founder and chairman, Rural Minds and co-founder and CEO, Jeff Winton Associates, sat down to discuss ways leadership within organizations can protect, support, and advance people, communities, and businesses.
Give us an example of resiliency in the workplace (at the individual, business, or community level).
I am the founder and chairman of Rural Minds, the only national 501(c)(3) focused on advocating for rural mental health equity, promoting mental wellness, and providing information and resources to confront rural mental health challenges and the stigma that surrounds mental illness. This nonprofit serves the 46 million people living in farming, ranching, and agriculture communities, small towns, and isolated areas across rural America.
We recognize resilience as being especially prominent among many of the people we serve in rural areas. In confronting greater barriers to mental health—including fewer health-care providers (who are often a significant distance away) and limited or nonexistent broadband internet—many face lifestyle challenges that require a mindset of resilience.
Rural communities lack many outside services that are available to people living in more populated areas. This often necessitates people living in rural areas to independently create solutions to their problems. While this self-reliant, do-it-yourself approach may be helpful in many situations, it can become another barrier to reaching out for help when it's coupled with the greater stigma that surrounds mental illness in rural America. In response, Rural Minds recently launched the Rural Mental Health Resilience Program. It provides access to free online mental health materials that empower rural Americans with culturally relevant information. They can independently get what they need to be part of the solution to improving rural mental health while serving as a trusted source of information in their community and normalizing conversations about mental health to break down the stigma.
As a leader in your industry/sector, what risks do you currently face, and which ones do you anticipate facing in the future that impact your workforce, business, and surrounding community?
An ongoing risk that I share with leaders across all industries is ensuring the mental wellness of the people who are the source of the output and productivity for companies within their sector. While it's not consistently recognized as such, I believe that the most critical aspect of a person's overall health is their mental health.
I say this as I think of my great admiration and respect for the people who have overcome a significant physical challenge with a strong psychological foundation. They are living their best life, given their circumstances, and are recognized as being productive contributors to their community. Conversely, a person can't thrive—and sometimes it’s not possible to survive—with an untreated mental illness.
What actions can employers take to mitigate risk(s) that will protect their employees, businesses, and communities?
We can raise awareness for the importance of making mental wellness a priority and normalize conversations about mental illness. Unlike other diseases, such as cancer or diabetes, many people don't acknowledge mental illness as an illness. And, like any other problem, the first step to addressing it is to talk about it.
Additionally, employers should provide employees with access to information about mental wellness and resources for accessing mental health care providers.
Could you share an example from your career journey where you prioritized or tapped into your resiliency? And what did that look like?
This is less about my career journey than my life journey, but it definitely made me tap into a resilience that I had not expected to have. Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties.
Growing up, I discovered that many of the families in my small, 500-person town had a relative or friend living with some form of untreated mental illness—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, or schizophrenia. But their struggle was met with silence. There were few or no resources in the community for treating them or conversations about helping them. The stigma attached to mental illness was palpable. But the death by suicide of my 28-year-old nephew, Brooks, was a wake-up call.
In the eulogy, I shared our family’s continuing struggle with mental illness. After the service, many local families shared their own experiences and thanked me for finally giving them permission to talk openly and freely about mental illness. While I will never fully recover from the painful impact of Brooks’ death, the courageous response of my mother and me to speak openly about Brooks' death led me to found Rural Minds.