San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A bold voice against a silent challenge
Lenny Mendonca’s abrupt resignation as the governor’s chief economic and business adviser and chair of the HighSpeed Rail Authority in April was a bit of a mystery. His stellar credentials as a retired senior partner at the global consulting powerhouse McKinsey & Co., his extensive record of leadership on public policy and widespread respect in and out of government had made him one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature hires and goto problem solvers.
Puzzled friends and capital insiders wondered: Why would he leave such a position of influence for the state about which he cared so deeply?
Mendonca explained it in a powerful essay on the CalMatters news site Monday. He was experiencing a serious bout of anxiety and depression.
The reaction to his forthright account of “a challenge 1 of every 3 people in America has” was as profound as it was supportive. Social media lit up with retweets and praise. “What a brave and important piece,” Newsom tweeted. “If you read one story today, read this,” tweeted Rep. Eric Swalwell, DDublin.
“It was so resonant to me because I’ve known forever that the way we try to break the stigma is to tell our stories,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a longtime champion of addressing mental health issues, told me in a phone interview. “The direct result is that people feel less shame, are willing to seek help and feel like they’re not ‘the other.’ ”
That this message came from someone with the stature of Mendonca made it all the more significant.
I caught up with Mendonca by phone last week to ask him about the decision to go public with his account. As with anyone who has covered public policy in California over the years, I’ve known Mendonca through his various roles with goodgovernment organizations. He was an inaugural nominee for The Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year award in 2015.
Mendonca said the essay began as an “internal cathartic piece.” He then began to share an edited version with friends.
“A few people told me, ‘Don’t do that. You’re going to be branded as that guy for your career.’ And that just empow
ered me to say, ‘That’s not right,’ ” he told me. “It’s no different than when I got on a bike and broke my ankle and had a friend take me to the hospital, and I went through a therapy program and everyone said they looked forward to me being back to work. That metal plate is something I talked about all the time, so what’s the difference?
“So I just decided to do it.”
He wrote about an emergency overnight hospital stay three weeks before his resignation. He was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. He went right back to work “against medical advice,” immersed in 80hour workweeks and sleepdeprived nights, and was back in the hospital a day after his resignation announcement with a more dire diagnosis.
“The doctor told me if I intended to see my granddaughters grow up, I needed to hit the reset button,” he wrote.
He did. And then, ever the advocate for public good, he decided to share his story in hopes others would do the same. The response has been gratifying. Mendonca figures he has had 75 to 100 opinion pieces published in his career. None has come close to the response of this one.
“I got this really interesting set of reactions from a bunch of business leaders, including some really senior people who were sending it around their companies to say, ‘We take this seriously and if you have an issue, I want you to address it,’ ” he told me.
As gripping as Mendonca’s story may be, it is not unusual.
“The issue of mental health is about all of us,” said Steinberg, whose first bill as a freshman assemblyman in 1998 was to provide mental health treatment to homeless people. He was the force behind Proposition 63, the 2004 initiative that raised taxes on milliondollar incomes to fund mental health programs. He noted that “everybody lives with some degree of depression and anxiety ... it’s a continuum ... it’s about being human.” His daughter, Jordana, revealed her own journey from mental health issues in an elegantly told personal essay in the Sacramento Bee in 2014.
Happily, Mendonca reports that his recovery is going well.
He acknowledged in his CalMatters essay that he was fortunate in many respects. He had great health insurance and access to quality care, including
Lenny Mendonca, in his CalMatters essay, available on sfchronicle.com/opinion doctors who “helped me find a treatment that worked for me.” His executive seniority “reduces the potential professional harm” of speaking out and “a safety net” to get him through the recovery period.
“The majority of people suffering from anxiety and depression do not have these privileges,” he wrote.
A significant element of Mendonca’s effectiveness as a leader has been the straightforward but nodrama style of a man who graduated from Harvard University and has operated at the highest levels of business and politics but never lost the grounding of having grown up on a dairy farm in rural Turlock (Stanislaus County), doing chores and milking cows almost every day.
In an interview for Mendonca’s 2015 Visionary of the Year profile, Newsom praised “his unique ability to navigate in disparate places, both traditional and nontraditional, while crossing ideological lines. He rises above it, and he’s looked to, universally, by almost everyone.”
Now Californians have one more reason to look to Lenny Mendonca, who has just crossed a most nontraditional line for a public figure in an effort to embolden others who have been suffering, unnecessarily, in silence.
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron
“The doctor told me if I intended to see my granddaughters grow up, I needed to hit the reset button.”