OUR MISSION
The Bette Rathjen Foundation for Emotional Health seeks to help re-shape the ways society and medicine address emotional health. The Foundation tackles emotional health directly, as every individual’s and every family’s concern; it seeks scientific and medical solutions to debilitating emotional illness; and it supports organizations that meet long-term needs of families confronting emotional illness.
ABOUT THE FOUNDATION
The Bette Rathjen Foundation for Emotional Health was founded in 2021 by Bette’s family to carry out the work that Bette had longed for beginning in her adolescence and that she stated was her intent to carry out in adulthood. Having suffered for the greatest part of her life with debilitating depression and emotional disability, she was determined to help those with emotional health differences and was passionate that our culture recognize that emotional illness is as crippling as other illness such as cancer or neurological disease.
The Foundation will fund qualified 501-c-3 organizations that pursue scientific solutions which promise population-level impact, that provide support for families confronting emotional illness and make discussions about emotional health commonplace.