Marquette’s Lovells quietly take on trauma epidemic
President spurred by significant mental illness in his family
Marquette University President Mike Lovell and his wife, Amy, sit at a table, discussing the epidemic of psychological trauma that overwhelms social agencies in Milwaukee and disables much of its workforce.
They’re talking about their role in addressing the crisis, a role that’s been growing since January, when the Lovells began hosting monthly brainstorming sessions. The meetings draw social service workers, therapists, university researchers, leaders of nonprofits, criminal justice authorities and health care representatives.
Seemingly every month, more chairs are added. At the most recent gathering, Ann Leinfelder Grove, the president of social service agency SaintA, said she looked forward to the gatherings more than
any other on her calendar. In recounting the comment, Mike Lovell glances toward his wife and says: “She really said that.”
Amy Lovell nods. She heard it the first time. She’s a mental health activist who’s as omnipresent in the monthly meetings as her husband.
The movement they’re shepherding — and make no mistake, they work as a team — comes in response to a raft of public health research over the last decade that is altering the understanding of chronic social and economic problems. It shows that neurological trauma inflicted in childhood — violence, abuse, neglect, drugs and chronic toxic stress — often is the root cause later in life for mental illness, hallucinations, sleep disorders, unemployment, drug use and even incarceration, homelessness and suicide.
What’s worse, unresolved trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing, perpetuating from one generation to the next, one family to the next, one neighborhood to the next.
Decades of anti-poverty campaigns, entitlement programs, tech booms and jobs efforts have not managed to stop the relentless downward spiral in the urban core of Milwaukee and other cities like it. Trauma researchers argue that such programs never will treat problems that fundamentally are rooted in neurology.
Instead, the untreated trauma needs to be addressed first — with services that by necessity are therapeutic and patient — in order to build newfound resiliency and break the cycle. One individual at a time. The work is neither easy nor simple.
“I boil everything down to one simple sentence,” says Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a supporter of the Lovells’ effort. “Every problem we encounter in the criminal justice system has its roots in trauma.”
The Lovells call their effort SWIM — Scaling Wellness In Milwaukee — and the gatherings sometimes resemble town hall meetings. They are raising prospects that Milwaukee might finally begin to move the needle on some of the city’s most persistent and destructive issues.
There is an added sense of urgency these days, with a building boom downtown, a national economic upswing and the promise of a sprawling new manufacturing campus to the city’s south run by Taiwan-based Foxconn.
“Look at it this way,” Mike Lovell reminds people. “We can’t really fail. We can’t make things worse than they are, even if we tried.”
Given the magnitude of the epidemic, SWIM might seem quixotic.
“It’s overwhelming at times,” Amy Lovell acknowledges. “But to do nothing is not right either.”
The Lovells are asked: Is their passion driven by the Jesuit mission that infuses Marquette, the idea of servant leadership and helping the whole human family?
Yes, they say.
Are they trying to help Milwaukee become one of a handful of trauma-responsive communities around the country, pioneering a new approach to social service, even if it’s not there yet? Yes.
Is it personal, driven by their own experiences and the chance to help people with whom they share more than most would expect?
Yes, they say a third time — glancing at each other again to mutually reinforce what they are about to disclose.
Tackling trauma
Many choose not to talk about issues of mental health and trauma, which are famously buried in stigma and shame. And post-traumatic scars are invisible by their nature.
SWIM, however, does appear to be opening up the conversation in new ways.
The intent of the gatherings is to explore whether there is a strategic way to redeploy the region’s existing cadre of therapists, social agencies, clinicians, hospitals and medical schools, drug and alcohol counselors, university researchers, and even the employment agencies and job training programs.
“With fewer silos, fewer people fall through the cracks,” says Amy Lovell.
That Milwaukee is siloed and segregated has been documented ad nauseam. The latest to weigh in is the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation in a July report on Milwaukee and its disparate public health efforts: “Bottom-up outreach” is a new concept in a city “which had often lacked grassroots input and advocacy,” the foundation concludes.
Noting that Milwaukee ranked as the second poorest big city as recently as 2015, the foundation report added: “Gun violence, domestic violence and other forms of trauma extract a steady, heavy toll.”
“We collectively have not treated a crisis like a crisis,” says Walter Lanier, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church of Milwaukee and member of the Milwaukee County Mental Health Board. “Our failure to do that with integrity and intentionality makes mediocrity almost unavoidable.”
Lanier, who helps lead a churchbased mental health initiative, attends SWIM meetings.
The Lovells are the first to acknowledge that their effort is as experimental as it is pioneering. They call it a “collective impact” model. They’re adamant that they don’t want to replicate existing efforts. They go out of their way to avoid saying anything that might smack of top-down, we-know-how-to-fix-you bureaucracy.
“They choose to convene, not command, to listen, not pronounce,” says Mary Triggiano, deputy chief judge in Milwaukee County and regular SWIM attendee. “They help create a vision where trauma is healed, and a stronger community created.”
“We’ve heard over and over again from the community — the only way we will move the needle is if we actually go into the communities themselves and have a presence there and work with trusted partners within the community,” Mike Lovell says. “At every meeting we say, if there’s someone else who needs to be here, please bring them.”
SWIM meetings attract 100 or so participants. Regulars include a diverse roster:
There is always a delegation from Saint-A, one of the state’s largest nonprofit child welfare agencies and a leader
in the state’s advocacy for trauma-informed social work.
There are clinics, big and small: the Medical College of Wisconsin, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, the behavioral health clinics at Aurora Health Care and Rogers Memorial Hospital. There are social agencies, therapists, drug and alcohol counselors and others certified in the healing arts.
There are faculty members from Marquette as well as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There are civic groups like Bader Philanthropies and the Greater Milwaukee Committee. There are officials from the county courts and the district attorney’s office as well as the state public defender’s office. The Milwaukee chapter of the American Heart Association has joined, citing data showing that mental health undermines cardiovascular health,
“So much of these things are about momentum,” Mike Lovell says. “You can feel the momentum building. You are starting to see action and things start to happen. When others see action start happening, their engagement and excitement go up.”
Many credit the Lovells. “SWIM is the best concentration of resources around one issue in one room that the city has ever seen. Ever,” says Franklin Cumberbatch, a strategist at Bader Philanthropies and member of the SWIM steering committee.
“You cannot separate Mike from Amy,” says Cumberbatch, who reckons the two got together in the first place because they share a mutual “moral compass.”
Much of the work involves soliciting input from each participant who wants to be heard.
“To get buy-in, everyone has a collective voice,” Amy Lovell says. In a continuous flow of husband-wife conversation, Mike adds: “But it’s hard to do heavy lifting in a group of 100 people.”
SWIM’s steering committee collects and synthesizes input. New subcommittees are forming. The Heart Association is leading a public policy committee for SWIM. Its mission is to have a voice in Madison for the city’s trauma-focused efforts. Amy Lovell leads an asset mapping committee meant to identify the neighborhoods with the fewest and the most resources — and at the same time, learn who else might want to join SWIM.
“This is not easy work, because it requires collaboration instead of competition and many, many people want their voices included,” says Leinfelder Grove of SaintA, also on the steering committee.
One idea that has emerged: a “mobile healing brigade” — an RV with social workers and specially trained clinicians who can work anywhere around Milwaukee. The idea isn’t new; it’s been road-tested in other cities. But it makes sense in Milwaukee, where many neighborhoods are disconnected from basic resources. “Amy came across this,” Mike Lovell says.
Another way to evangelize their cause will be a conference from Sept. 26-28, meant to engage people by the hundreds from communities across the Midwest. Planners are trying to recruit major national speakers as well as local leaders. To kick off the three-day event, the Lovells booked the new Milwaukee Bucks arena, making the trauma conference one of the inaugural events at the venue.
“When we started this, we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen — we were just getting this group together to talk about what actions we could do,” Mike says. “It happened organically and it’s exciting.”
Asked if SWIM can be transformational to the city, Mike Lovell says: “Yes. Absolutely.”
Personal struggles
The Lovells are the first to acknowledge that their effort is as experimental as it is pioneering. They call it a “collective impact” model. They’re adamant that they don’t want to replicate existing efforts. They go out of their way to avoid saying anything that might smack of top-down, we-know-how-to-fix-you bureaucracy.
Both devout Catholics, the Lovells appear to grasp from their faith and first-hand experience that the cycle can be broken, no matter how daunting it might seem, and that people inherently are resilient if given the chance. They both believe in post-traumatic growth — not just post-traumatic disorders.
Already soft-spoken, Mike Lovell drops his voice a notch further when he talks about his personal story.
“We had significant mental illness in my family,” he says, a disarming revelation from the president of a major university.
Lovell recounts the suicide of his grandfather; the crippling depression of his mother; the alcoholism of his father, who was sometimes abusive to his mom. He lauds his mother’s strength.
“She was a faith-filled woman” who managed to hold a job despite repeated hospitalizations for clinical depression. “My mother actually had multiple suicide attempts when I was growing up. And that was a time when mental illness was kept quiet and so we didn’t talk about it.”
Amy Lovell’s story has several parallels. She came home at age 10 and discovered her mom on the floor, collapsed with a brain aneurysm. Her mom’s health was touch and go from then on; she had years of mini-strokes and brain surgeries. Amy and her siblings “walked on eggshells” to avoid any upset in the house, and lived modestly.
“I had a reduced price lunch ticket growing up,” Amy says.
Her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was 13 — the same age as Mike when his parents broke up. Amy, too, speaks with admiration of her mother’s resilience.
Both had neighbors, teachers, coaches, church communities and other family members to step in and help. But both were forced to become self-reliant at relatively young ages. Trauma researchers would call them resilient.
They met as students at the University of Pittsburgh. “He asked me to go to Mass as our first date,” Amy Lovell recalls. They have now been married 25 years and have four children.
The Lovells kept their stories to themselves throughout the 10 years since they moved to Milwaukee and took positions of public prominence. They didn’t share them in launching SWIM either. Amy Lovell was surprised that her husband agreed to finally open
up; “I didn’t think he’d want to be that vulnerable,” she says.
Both acknowledge that resources to treat post-traumatic afflictions are costly, scarce and many families cannot afford to intervene. “In one way or another, this (topic of trauma) touches almost everybody,” says Mike, as Amy picks up the thread: “And there are just more roadblocks in front of some people in terms of healing.”
Testing for trauma
“A Time to Heal,” a series of stories last year in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of life. It documented the symptoms of those who struggle with posttraumatic disorders that often are similar to that seen in military veterans.
The Journal Sentinel also used the same metrics to examine rural communities in Wisconsin, which also have stagnant economies, revealing a growing rural underclass with near-identical dysfunctional demographic profiles as poor families in Milwaukee.
The Time to Heal series was reported through a research fellowship from the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
Back in March, as SWIM was gaining traction, Mike Lovell did something rare for someone with a prominent position: he publicly released his personal trauma score.
Lovell scored himself using the most common metric for civilian trauma, called the adverse childhood experience survey. The ACE test, as it’s known, consists of simple yes-or-no questions: When you were growing up, did a parent or adult in the house beat you? Beat each other? Did any of them sexually abuse you? Emotionally ignore you? Were any of them alcoholics? Drug users? Incarcerated? Mentally ill?
Results are universally consistent and predictive: Compared to someone with zero “yes” answers, a person with a score of four or higher is about six times more likely to struggle with depression; seven times more likely to become alcoholic; and 12 times more likely to attempt suicide. They’re twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer. Mike Lovell’s score: Five. A mechanical engineer, academic and researcher, fluent in the sciences, Lovell might be one of the last people one would expect to lead a major initiative that involves mental health and neurological trauma.
Lovell, however, was expected to be a catalyst for change when he and his family moved to Milwaukee 10 years ago — albeit no one could have expected SWIM, not even the Lovells.
In 2008, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee recruited Lovell to oversee the linchpin of the most ambitious expansion in UWM’s history: Lovell was named the new dean of the UWM College of Engineering and Applied Science — with an explicit mission to expand its faculty and research mission and educate a new generation of techsavvy scientists with the skills to advance regional Wisconsin industry in the 21st century.
There was urgency at the time in a metro region eager for any new competitive advantage — and anguishing about the loss of jobs, income and competitiveness. In effect, UWM asked Lovell to aspire to do for Milwaukee what UW-Madison, Stanford University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology do for their respective regions.
Lovell also helped create the Water Council, another Milwaukee-based collective that yokes together siloed and disparate entrepreneurs and researchers in the water-technology sector. In the last decade, the Water Council has positioned Milwaukee in a sector that’s green, global and growing.
Lovell rose to the post of UWM chancellor in 2010 to replace outgoing Chancellor Carlos Santiago, the man who launched UWM’s $240 million expansion and who personally recruited Lovell. In 2014, when Marquette suddenly needed a new president, Lovell moved across town.
In his four years as Marquette president, Lovell has tried to underscore the university’s connection to its community. He created an office of community engagement. He commissioned a survey finding that Marquette students collectively volunteer 450,000 hours of community service each year.
And at the same time that he and Amy launched SWIM, Lovell announced a President’s Grand Challenge, meant to collect ideas from the school’s faculty as well as nonprofits and social agencies on new ideas of social engagement. The idea is for the university to create collaborations with community groups, which can compete for funding for test projects.
Amy Lovell, meanwhile, founded an advocacy group for youth mental health, called REDgen, following a spate of youth suicides in the city’s northern suburbs in 2013. She and other REDgen staffers are trained in suicide prevention protocols.
“Trauma happens everywhere,” says Amy Lovell.
“Being a chancellor or president was never Mike’s ambition. Ever,” Amy Lovell says. “I can tell you that from knowing Mike for too many years. He was a researcher. He loved teaching. Maybe vice president for research might have been his trajectory.”
“But this,” his wife says, referring to the couple’s unprecedented role in encouraging the development of a new social service network, “this is God.”
A higher cause
The Lovells still need to transform their loose network into a team that can sync their agendas under the banner of a bigger cause and common strategy.
Asked about their vision, Amy Lovell cites her husband’s favorite movie – “Miracle,” the story of the underdog 1980 U.S. Olympic men’s ice hockey team, which upset the strongly favored Soviet Union team and went on to win gold.
U.S. coach Herb Brooks had seven months to put together an amateur squad from college teams across the nation — a roster of athletes who had never previously collaborated. In the movie, Brooks drills his players with the same questions: What’s your name and who do you play for? The players routinely respond by naming their respective university teams.
Fed up after a loss in an exhibition game, Brooks has his players do hours of torturous wind sprints on the ice — until the team captain finally figures out what Brooks wants to hear:
Exhausted and panting, team captain Mike Eruzione yells out: “I play for the United States of America.” Brooks finally ends their post-game drills.
“That’s when the team gets it,” Amy Lovell says, when they recognize their service to a higher collective cause. The message is clear: The goal for the disparate patchwork of agencies and activists is to play for Milwaukee.
There will be at least one difference, however, in how the Lovells try to reach that point, compared to the mercurial hockey coach, Cumberbatch says.
“The Lovells let everyone else talk first.”