Billionaire John Pritzker Donating Nearly $60 Million For Mental Health At U.C. San…

One big hurdle to treating mental health issues is the reluctance across much of society to talk about them—whether it’s eating disorders or schizophrenia or any other mental illness. John Pritzker, a San Francisco billionaire, and his former wife, Lisa Stone Pritzker, are doing their part to change that: They are donating nearly $60 million to construct a state-of-the-art psychiatry building for U.C. San Francisco adjacent to the university’s campus in the city’s Mission Bay neighborhood. The building will be home to researchers, interdisciplinary academics and mental health services for patients of all ages. 

Mental health is a personal issue for these philanthropists. The structure will be called the Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building, in honor of John’s sister Nancy, who died by suicide during a depressive episode in 1972. “Nancy was a brilliant, funny, beautiful young woman who struggled with mental health,” says John, who recalls that when his sister died, it wasn’t something anyone talked about. Later, John says he and his younger sister Gigi did discuss Nancy’s illness and death, and “there was an enormous sense of relief. The more you talk about it, the easier it becomes to talk about.” One big aim of this center, he says, is to reduce the stigma around discussing mental health issues, so that more people will recognize them and seek treatment. 

Lisa Stone Pritzker remembers how someone in her immediate family suffered from depression, and how it impacted her whole family. It also led her to volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital’s psychiatric floor about 17 years ago. “I saw tiny children waiting for psychiatric care in cramped, poorly lit waiting rooms, often sitting next to adults in terrible distress,” she says. That led her to come up with a vision for a place that had a more family-friendly environment. The new Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry building, which is slated to open in the fall, will have its own Child, Teen and Family center to provide a welcoming environment.

Mental health is a national concern, and one that has been a difficult issue during the pandemic. Nearly one in five American adults lives with a mental health disorder, while one in six children between the age of six and 17 has such a condition, per UC San Francisco. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for U.S. teenagers. 

Yet mental health is also an area for which large philanthropic gifts are not all that common, especially compared to gifts for researching a variety of cancers—though there have been some significant mental health gifts and pledges over the past decade. In 2019, the family of the late billionaire Jon Huntsman announced a 10-year, $150 million donation to the University of Utah to create the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. In 2014, Connecticut businessman and philanthropist Ted Stanley made a $650 million pledge for mental health research at The Broad Institute, a research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts that partners with MIT and Harvard. And in 2012, New York real estate billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman pledged $200 million to endow a Mind Brain Behavior center at Columbia University named after him. 

Matthew State, chair and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF, says the Pritzkers’ donation enabled UC San Francisco to create a building from a blank sheet of paper, and to design it with a focus on treating patients. “We’ll have physical and mental health providers right next to each other,” he explained, adding that for a patient coming in with, say, an eating disorder, the psychiatrist and the nutritionist will be in the same building, which hasn’t been the norm. “The idea is to build the care around the patients and families,” State explains.

John Pritzker hails from the Chicago-based family behind Hyatt Hotels, which is chaired by his brother Tom Pritzker. John sold his shares in Hyatt to relatives in 2010 and went on to build his own boutique hotel management company, which became known as Two Roads Hospitality after a 2016 merger. Then in late 2018, Hyatt purchased Two Roads for $408 million plus a potential $96 million if certain outcomes were met. John and Lisa Pritzker divorced in 2019; Lisa serves on the board of UCSF.

If you or people you know are at risk of self-harm, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides 24-hour support at 1-800-273-8255.