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Charting My Own Path by Launching the Yale Conference on Mental Illness

January 15, 2025

Amy Ouellette ’23 reflects on her experience organizing a mental health conference as a Yale SOM student.

A person pointing at a conference poster mounted on an easel

I came to Yale SOM wanting to build a conference on serious mental illness. Some of my previous academic and professional pursuits had centered on serving marginalized populations. During college and after graduation, I worked as a data analyst on twoprojects aiming to prevent violent conflict in Sudan. During that time, a research trip to Rwanda opened my eyes to the role that the private sector plays in societal transformation. These experiences drove me to seek business skills and a management education in order to become a better change agent.

Over time, I steered my mission-driven efforts from international problems to domestic ones, where I could be closer to my roots. As my work in public-sector consulting took on a U.S.-based focus, so did my volunteerism: I was the Washington, D.C. local liaison for Deloitte’s stepup program and later I joined the Emerging Leaders Board for Boston Healthcare for the Homeless.

Through these experiences, I became exposed to major cracks in America’s mental healthcare system. The opportunity to use my time at SOM to explore fixing this broken system felt aligned with my broader purpose and values. Through the school’s unique resources—including cross-school integration, access to the broader Yale network, and opportunities for global study—I turned my dream into reality. In April 2023, Evans Hall hosted the inaugural Yale Conference on Mental Illness.

I first voiced this vision to a classmate, Jessie Liu, during a session of Power and Politics, a course I took in my second semester. She shared my drive to destigmatize mental illness and paired up with me to co-chair the event. A few blocks away, at a Digital Health Club happy hour that connected students from many Yale schools, I met Fuwen Tu, a public health student with neuroscience background, and she became the third co-chair.

Having assembled this team, I sought advice from SOM faculty on conceptualizing and pitching the conference. Professor Rodrigo Canales, who taught the core course Innovator, coached me on framing my idea and helped me test out the pitch on different audiences. Fergus Turner, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business where I studied abroad, helped me settle on the “systems thinking” approach to organizing the event. He even sat down with me at a restaurant along the Cape Town waterfront to brainstorm ideas. My educational experiences inside and outside the classroom pushed me to deepen my thinking and empowered me to take action on the topics I’m passionate about.

Seeking backing, my co-chairs and I looked for like-minded partners on and off campus. During my first year at SOM, I heard about a panel on the public health crisis in prisons at Yale Law School’s Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, and I jumped at the chance to attend. I resonated with the takeaways, including a need for better community health infrastructure, and applied to become a Solomon Student Fellow. This fellowship, which I received in my second year, provided support including networking opportunities and resources for conference expenses.

Several people posing for a photo with a conference poster
The conference couldn’t have succeeded without the hard-working planning team.

By April of my second year, we had partnered with five sponsors, confirmed 11 presenters, and registered just shy of 300 attendees. In my last quarter as an MBA student, I finally got to see student planners, speakers, and attendees flock to Yale for our event. Our intended approach was to bring separate parts of the mental health system together to interact and form a whole.

The morning of the conference, Dr. Kyu Rhee, a health care executive, kicked off the event with the fireside chat. I felt so much gratitude for Dr. Rhee, a Yale College alum whom I had met during a summer internship at CVS Health, as I sat in the chair next to him. Even as a very senior leader several levels above me, he took the time to mentor me and others. He even grabbed a slice of New Haven pizza at Da Legna with Health Care Club students while he was on campus. Dr. Rhee advised us that making change required following the money, mission, and data.

Building on this chat, Dr. Thomas Insel—a former National Institute of Mental Health director nicknamed “the nation’s psychiatrist”—presented on social, environmental, and political solutions to improve the mental health system. A moment to release the energy came next: eight musicians moved the audience to tears with a performance of the second movement of Schubert’s Octet in F Major, a piece that tells a story of struggle and resolution. I was equally proud of these less conventional immersions that we organized—besides the Schubert, the conference featured a morning meditation, monologue performance, art-making activity, and yoga class.

Gaining momentum from the two keynote sessions, we leaped into five TED Talk-style presentations. Speakers talked about their own specialties, which ranged from healthcare ecosystems, early intervention psychosis clinics, impact litigation and community lawyering, physical health management for adults with severe mental illness, and trauma-informed street psychiatry for the unhoused. These experts explained the mental health system’s central tools and issues, but through separate lenses—so we designed a final session of the day to break down the silos.

After lunch, I hosted a panel that featured all nine presenters, and I was daunted by the knowledge that I couldn’t control it fully. The conversation was messy, complex, and at times hard to reign in. Powerful moments flowed in the safe space we created. Speakers poked holes in each other’s ways of viewing critical problems, and audience members offered personal anecdotes of emergency room visits or loved ones in crisis. During that hour, the collective room integrated the distinct pieces of our mental healthcare system into a whole. We felt how traumatizing the current system in America is, and named opportunities to change the status quo. Wrapping up, the group filled smaller classrooms to synthesize observations into action steps.

As we wound down the day by raffling off book prizes, one of the presenters remarked that our conference was one of the best he’d ever attended. Over closing snacks, I finally got to pause and take stock. I looked around the Evans Hall lobby at students, professionals, and community members from different backgrounds, schools, and industries forming connections. I knew I couldn’t have created this platform to discuss one of the most important problems facing our society without the lessons I learned and benefits I gained from my time at SOM.

Related Readings

Kayla Del Biondo, Yale’s Simbonis Librarian for Public Health, curated this reading list of works written by the presenters or referenced during the conference.