Who: Dr. Husseini Manji, global therapeutic head for neuroscience.
Company: Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals Group
Charitable giving highlights: Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, owned by Johnson & Johnson, gives $12 million annually to education causes related to mental health.
Tell me about new developments in Johnson & Johnson’s corporate philanthropy.
We just launched Healthy Minds, which is an umbrella that tries to capture everything we’re doing in the neuroscience space. We’ve always been committed to serious neuropsychiatric illness but now we’re starting to pull together all the things we’re doing under one initiative.
What activities are you doing?
When people have mental illnesses, they can’t retain their jobs. We’ve partnered with and sponsored Dartmouth’s community mental health program to educate people about trying to assist people in getting job placement.
What was the impetus for creating this Healthy Minds initiative?
I was at the National Institutes of Health for 15 years before joining Johnson & Johnson three years ago and involved in trying to understand the brain at a more fundamental level to come up with treatment for these devastating illnesses.
I think there’s a real recognition about how devastating these diseases are. We think 5 million have the Alzheimer’s disease. Mental diseases are not only very disabling but fatal — responsible for something like 35,000 deaths each year from suicide.
Also the veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the injuries they’re coming back with are brain-related.
So we’ve got this huge need and at the same time some believe we’re in a golden age of neuroscience. But research tends to be more fragmented because it’s so specialized.
Can we coalesce things so we can do more together, remove duplication and connect the dots? That’s how the Healthy Minds initiative came.
— Interview with Vanessa Small
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