Glenn Close has won a 2009 AARP Inspire Award for her advocacy to combat the stigma of mental illness. Says AARP Magazine:

Two years ago the actress began quietly making donations to Fountain House, a 60-year-old not-for-profit organization headquartered in New York City that she discovered while searching for help for her relatives. Fountain House, the model for 325 facilities around the world, offers its members assistance with jobs, education, and housing and also provides a supportive community. “It’s a place where people with mental illness can go and feel safe and that they’re worth something and have value,” Close says. Several times in the past year, Close has volunteered at the New York City Fountain House–cooking meals, arranging flowers with members, and working the phones to help find places to stay for those who are on the streets.

Her involvement in 2009 will be riskier: in the year ahead Close, 61, will headline a national advertising campaign intended to diminish the stigma of mental illness. The actress will represent the face of the three most common mental health disorders: depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. “When I first thought about doing this, I wondered if people would think that I was mentally ill,” says Close. “Then I thought, ‘What’s the alternative? Not to do it?'”

“She gets nothing from this,” adds Fountain House president Kenn Dudek, “and it is in fact a little dangerous. Everybody knows that if you come out and admit a connection with these illnesses, you risk being thought of as unreliable or dangerous, when in fact most of the mentally ill are not.”

Her sensitivity to human frailty has been heightened from watching her mentally ill relatives struggle with addiction, cope with treatment costs (“One of my family members once had to choose between buying a new coat for her child or visiting her therapist”), and deal with the side effects of their medications. What has troubled Close the most, though, and inspired her decision to get more involved with Fountain House, was witnessing the excruciating isolation they experienced. “There was a big part of me that wanted to get into the trenches,” she says.

Close acknowledges that continued research into better treatments for mental illnesses is important. But erasing the stigma, she says, is the first step. That will lead to better funding and better care. Most important, it will help ease the loneliness her family members and others feel. For that, she says, speaking out on behalf of those who cannot always speak up for themselves is worth any risk.