Christena Huntsman lost her sister to mental illness; she doesn’t want that to happen to anyone else

SALT LAKE CITY — The enormity of what’s going on at the University of Utah to confront and treat mental illness is in many ways unequal to anything in the world.

There’s the 162-bed psychiatric hospital on Chipeta Way that underwent a major transformation in 2019–2021; there’s the Kem and Carolyn Gardner Mental Health Crisis Center that opened last year in South Salt Lake to care for emergency and acute cases; and there’s the nearly-completed 185,000-square-foot Utah Mental Health Translational Research Center, a facility adjacent to the hospital with room for 100-plus of the kind of premier mental health researchers a cutting-edge place like that is bound to attract.

In the space of less than seven years, thanks to many benefactors — including the University of Utah Health system, generous support from the Legislature and numerous private donors — Utah is becoming the very epicenter in the battle against mental illness.

And all because of the love one woman has for her sister.

To find the spark that started the Utah mental health revolution, you need to go back to two girls growing up side by side in the 1960s and 1970s.

Christena was born first, in 1964, the third child and first daughter of Jon M. and Karen Huntsman. The Huntsman surname wasn’t famous then like it is now. Jon was yet to invent the clamshell burger container for McDonald’s that paved the way to his $12 billion chemical company, which in turn produced, among many other philanthropic projects, the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Next came Kathleen, born in January 1966, 17 months after her big sister.

Christena and Kathleen were best pals from day one. They shared a bedroom as the family moved from California to Washington, D.C., to Utah. They talked about anything and everything. They knew each other’s hopes and dreams.

As much as they were alike, they were also different. Christena tended to throw open the drapes in the morning and announce, “It’s a beautiful day!” while Kathleen would just as often say, “Shut the drapes, not every single day is beautiful.”

Kathleen developed eating disorders. Then she started to self-medicate with addictive substances. None of it happened all at once. Her problems were looked at as weaknesses, not symptoms. The antidote was pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work harder, tough it out. No one mentioned depression. No one thought the problem might be in her brain. No one probed to figure out the “why” beyond the “what.”

Untreated for mental illness, Kathleen’s life began to spiral out of control. In 2010, at the age of 44, an overdose plunged her into cardiac arrest. Her billionaire father had to pull the plug on the machines keeping her alive.

The Huntsmans shut the drapes and kept Kathleen’s issues private. When her older brother Jon Jr., the former Utah governor, wrote her obituary, he didn’t say a word about mental illness. “We didn’t want anyone to know,” he said.

“We kept it so quiet,” says Christena. “This kind of thing didn’t happen to families like ours. There was so much shame and stigma attached.”

After Kathleen’s funeral, the Huntsmans continued to suffer in silence — but as the grieving process progressed, a gradual shift in the family’s thinking began to take place. They started to ask questions.

Why was it shameful? Why was there a stigma? A family that was literally trying to cure cancer pondered on why mental illness wasn’t also being looked at and treated like a disease instead of like a medieval plague.

Before Jon Sr. died in 2018, he gathered his eight living children around him and challenged them to “go find the cancer of your generation” and take it on.

Christena did not hesitate in designating mental illness as the cancer of her generation.

The next year, with the family’s consent, Christena gifted $150 million from the Huntsman Family Foundation to University of Utah Health for mental healthcare.

After accepting the gift and noting it was the largest single donation ever given to the school, then-University of Utah president Ruth Watkins had another request.

“Your money is great,” she said, “but what we need and want is your name on the building.”

Adding “Huntsman” to the title would add priceless de-stygmatizing credibility.

The family agreed. In January of 2021, the former University Neuropsychiatric Institute became the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. (Of note: In Jon Huntsman Jr.’s campaign for governor in 2020, he made mental health and suicide prevention a big part of his platform, openly mentioning his sister Kathleen’s struggles and the need to bring mental illness out of the shadows.)

“I’m just honored to get to spearhead and be the leader in our family around mental health,” says Christena, who wears two hats, one as CEO of the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation and another as a director with the Huntsman Family Foundation.

She comes to work every day “and works harder than any of us,” says Brett Graham, CEO of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute.

“I hear Dad’s voice, gotta move faster, gotta move faster,” Christena says. “He would always say cancer moves fast, we gotta move faster. I don’t feel we’re moving fast enough. I want the world to see the work that’s being done here, the lives that can be helped. I wish I knew then what I know now, because if Kathleen had the treatments and facilities we have now, she may be here today to talk about her recovery.

“Let’s get people help on the front end before they become homeless, before they become an addict, before tragedy takes over. We’re going to change the way we look and treat and talk about mental illness.

“It’s personal for me. I lost my sister.”