Ad man turned mental health crusader dies
While DJ Jaffe was working as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue, he and his wife became the caretakers of his wife’s half sister, who had moved from Milwaukee as a troubled teenager to live with them in their Manhattan apartment when she was a troubled teenager. Before long, she became catatonic. She was later found to have schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
The experience plunged Jaffe, who died on Aug. 23 at 65, into the world of mental health, which he quickly came to see as dysfunctional.
It also turned him into a crusader. Even as he pursued a successful advertising career over three decades, he became a powerful voice and lobbyist for people with profound mental illnesses.
Provocative and blunt-spoken, Jaffe became the driving force behind Kendra’s Law, a controversial measure passed in New York state in 1999 that authorized the courts to mandate outpatient psychiatric treatment for people who might pose a danger to themselves or others. If they fail to comply, they can be seized by police and hospitalized for a three-day lockup period.
The law was named for Kendra Webdale, a young woman who was killed when a stranger with untreated schizophrenia shoved her in front of an oncoming subway train in Manhattan in 1999.
Kendra’s Law became the model for programs around the country called “assisted outpatient therapy,” in which patients are evaluated by a clinical team, a psychiatrist and a judge to create a treatment plan.
Critics argued that the law impinged on the civil liberties of these patients. And by 2005, racial disparities were reported in its use, with Black people five times as likely as white people to be subjected to it. But it was also hailed as reducing homelessness, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and incarcerations.
On the federal level, Jaffe was instrumental in the passage of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016, which made available psychiatric, psychological and supportive services for people and families in crisis.
His brother Robert said he died of complications from leukemia at his home in Harlem.
Jaffe was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative research group that studies urban affairs, and promoted some ideas that he called politically incorrect — that some people never recover from mental illness, for example, and that seriously mentally ill people are often violent.
He was also the author of “Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill” (2017).
The book, a scathing indictment of the system, said that while billions were spent on mental wellness for the general population, programs for those with the most serious mental health issues were vastly underfunded.
In a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, he pointed to the stark example of the young man who killed 17 students and staff members in Parkland, Florida. Many people, including the shooter’s family, knew he was seriously ill, but Jaffe wrote, the system prevented anyone from getting him help until it was too late.
Don Lyle Jaffe was born Nov. 21, 1954, in New Rochelle, New York. His father, Saul Jaffe, owned a commercial photo lab, and his mother, Phyllis (Stohn) Jaffe, was a stockbroker.
Jaffe, who went by DJ, grew up in Edgemont in Westchester County, just north of New York City. He graduated from New York University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting in the late 1970s.
He was recruited by Coopers & Lybrand, the accounting firm, which later became PricewaterhouseCoopers, and he moved to Chicago. Only then did he realize he hated accounting. After putting out the word that he was available, he was recruited by an advertising agency and moved back to New York.
Over time, he worked at different agencies, including Gotham Inc., SSC & B Lintas, Foote Cone & Belding and Leo Burnett. His accounts included Coke, Citibank, United Airlines and the US Postal Service, his brother said, and he was part of the team that popularized the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Snuggle, the mascot of Downy fabric softener.
He married Rose Wagner, who managed women’s fashion boutiques, in 1991 and soon became involved in caring for his sisterin-law, Lynn Gommermann, and fighting the mental health system.
His wife died in 2018. In addition to his brother Robert, he is survived by another brother, Jay. He provided for Gommermann, his sister-in-law, in his will, his family said. She now lives in Milwaukee.
Jaffe met Paula Orndoff, a filmmaker and producer, in April 2019. They were married on his bed at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on Aug. 14, nine days before he died. Because of the Coronavirus, friends and relatives attended the ceremony by Zoom.