Seated in a plum-colored armchair, her dark blonde waves flowing to her elbows, a heavy pearl necklace mirroring the shape of her face, Calistoga city council member Lisa Gift spoke of stormy seas. A lifelong sailor, Gift talked about clouds, about wind. About sometimes needing safe harbor to flee powerful swells.
Gift was not delivering the keynote at a conference for salty sailors. The two-term council member was using the weather as an analogy for mental health as she addressed a suicide prevention conference Wednesday in Yountville.
“Mental health is part of the human condition, and if we talk about [mental health] like we talk about the weather — openly, casually and without fear — we create a world where people don’t have to pretend. Where people don’t have to wait until they’re in crisis to be cared for,” Gift said.
The conference, “Beyond Awareness: Allies in Action for Suicide Prevention,” was hosted by Mentis Napa, a nonprofit that provides bilingual and affordable mental health services to people of every age and income level. Mentis Napa formed in 1948 to help families readjust to civilian life in the wake of WWII, and its mission has since expanded. The conference offered a resource fair, expert panels on protecting groups most at risk of suicide, and roving therapists to support attendees.
“Suicide is the most preventable kind of death, but so many people struggle in silence because they don’t understand that there’s hope. They don’t feel like there’s any other way that they’re going to feel better. So if you can instill hope and then offer resources for support, you save lives,” said Jeni Olsen, Mentis Napa’s prevention director and chair of the Napa County Suicide Prevention Council.
“I know Lisa’s reason for doing this is because she wants to help somebody out there who might be struggling silently,” Olsen said. “She is so courageous to share her story with the community.”
During the pandemic, Gift’s wine marketing business struggled and then shuttered, compounding the isolation she already felt mothering her young son under shelter-in-place orders. She suffered four miscarriages in two years, one during her second trimester. Gift’s mental health spiraled, and in 2022, while serving her first term on the city council, she tried to end her life.
Gift survived. She was taken to the hospital and put on an involuntary psychiatric hold for up to 72 hours, a practice known by its code number in California’s Welfare and Institutions Code: 5150. But then, without her knowledge, a psychiatrist upgraded her to a 5250. This more serious classification is reserved for a person who still poses a danger or is gravely disabled after the initial 5150 evaluation. A 5250 hold can last up to 14 days.
The psychiatrist who recategorized Gift never met with her beforehand; he had only spoken with her husband, who she later learned had already begun divorce proceedings.
While in the initial isolation period, Gift worked with a patient advocate and investigated the care she knew she’d need once back home. She said she was not a threat, nor was she disabled. Gift appeared before a judge to petition for her freedom.
When she left the hospital, Gift faced divorce papers, a custody battle for her son and, later, court appearances over a domestic restraining order. She had been served a vacate order by Calistoga Police and given 20 minutes to pack a bag and leave her home.
“We don’t talk enough about the cost of surviving,” Gift said to a rapt audience, some of whom gasped and daubed their eyes during her retelling. “The real trauma isn’t the moment itself, it’s the aftermath.”
That aftermath, Gift said, is fueled by a hundred years of learned societal stigma that pushes people deeper into despair and also prevents them from healing when they’re ready.
It was exactly as she’d feared.
Her phone stopped ringing. Her texts went unanswered. Social invitations dried up and she felt shunned at her preschool-aged son’s sporting events, which she used to coach. It was as if she’d gone back to the time before the term “mental health” was in our collective vocabulary, when polite society determined “lunatics” belonged in “asylums.”
“People remove themselves from the world so [mental health] stigma doesn’t reflect on them in life,” she said.
Yet somehow, she marveled, her city government colleagues didn’t seem susceptible to the stigma like everyone else.
“I wasn’t asked to step aside,” Gift said of the period immediately after her attempt or during the 45 days she spent at a women’s wellness clinic in Marin. She missed a couple meetings and then was back researching policy and presenting ideas as she had before. A decade ago, she said, “I would have been sidelined.”
In the two years that followed, as Gift consistently met responsibilities at the city council and to her family, she witnessed the beginning of what she called an evolution.
“My community didn’t conflate my breakdown with my ability to be an effective leader. They spoke quietly, collectively and supported me through re-election,” Gift said of her second run in 2024.
Then, she said, something remarkable happened. People approached her at Calistoga’s outdoor summer music series, openly engaging about her mental health and about theirs, too. People were talking to her — in public — about their feelings.
She felt for the first time that maybe old-fashioned stigma could fade from society and that Calistoga was the template.
It’s this local connection that spurred Jeni Olsen from Mentis Napa to book Gift for the keynote, particularly because this year’s conference had a local focus. According to a county dataset, Napa County saw 17 suicides in 2023, up from 12 in 2022. Napa County averages almost 11 suicides per year.
“We’ve been working with the Napa County epidemiologist to really understand local data around who’s dying by suicide here,” Olsen said. That local data comes from the county coroner’s office, hospital emergency departments and law enforcement, and shows that veterans, older adults and LGBTQ+ youth as those most at-risk for death by suicide.
“I really loved Lisa’s personal approach to this work, her lived experience, and that she’s a council member,” Olsen said. “She uses her platform to really try and break the stigma around talking about mental health and that suicide does not discriminate. I thought her message would really resonate with our community members locally.”
Napa resident Elissa Fischer Harris said Gift’s story was a “heartbreaking confirmation…that we have a deeply broken mental health system.”
Four of Fisher Harris’s family members have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, including her mother and brother. As a child, Fisher Harris and her mother were homeless as a symptom of her mother’s illness, and her brother suffered painfully for decades before dying by suicide.
Fisher Harris was grateful for the level of detail Gift shared, particularly about her psychiatric holds.
“My brother had all the requirements for an involuntary hold, and he desperately needed that hold and that treatment, and yet the system let him go. And so, walking away from her talk, it was just clear to me that the broken system failed both of them in very different ways, and it’s just not OK on either end,” Fisher Harris said. “In her case, [Lisa] was having the system turned against her when she fully, cognizantly wanted to get help.”
Gift, Fisher Harris and Olsen agree wholesale change in our healthcare system is needed to save lives. Care should come from compassionate professionals providing situational solutions for each person, and crisis care should never evoke incarceration.
But not lost on them is the importance of change in our neighbor-to-neighbor, friend-to-friend interactions.
“We don’t need to fix people, we need to create an environment where they don’t have to hide,” Gift said. “Mental health lives in community. So does healing. Everyone in this room can shift the discussion around mental health. Not with grand gestures. But with small statements.”
She suggested new vocabulary, new phrases to use in conversation, including: “That sounds hard. Tell me more.” “You don’t have to hide it from me.” “I love you; we’ll get through this.”
Discussing mental health status should be matter-of-fact, just like the weather.
“We don’t end suicide by pretending its rare,” Gift said. “We end it by making it safe to speak. Safe to struggle. Safe to reach out. Safe to be real.”
Fisher Harris was listening.
“You’re eliminating the stigma that something is wrong with you by bringing up the fact that ‘I’m not doing well.’ You’re talking about it just like you would say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful day,’ or ‘What a crappy day it is today,’” Fisher Harris said. “It’s the same.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.