How did The Headstrong Project initially get started?

How did The Headstrong Project initially get started?
Well, my background is a military veteran. I was in the Marine Corps. I did a number of tours in Iraq and served in a bunch of other places. We [along with co-founders David Petrucco and Al Rabil] came together with the idea that there are a lot of different barriers to care. There’s cost, there’s bureaucracy, there’s access to care, and we wanted to build an organization that made it very, very easy and very, very simple for people who have the courage to step forward and get help to get help. The biggest barrier to care is stigma, and in the next year there are some programs we want to implement to fight the stigma associated with mental health and getting treatment. If somebody has the courage to step up and get help, you certainly want it to be as easy as possible. I have a long relationship with some of the staff members at Cornell—I went to Cornell—and through those relationships, we started talking about what we could do to help veterans here in the city; what could we do to build a scalable program nationwide. So about a year ago, we came together and raised a small amount of money to seed a program at Cornell Medical center and to start treating folks. [Photo via]
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