First-Class Lady Honored

The event: Silver Ribbon Award Dinner honoring former First Lady Rosalynn Carter for her leadership in the fight against mental illness. The UC Irvine Brain Imaging Center Committee presented the award to Carter last week at the Sutton Place Hotel in Newport Beach.

Speaking her mind: Guests gave Carter a standing ovation for her work on behalf of the mentally ill--her pet cause since 1967. “I’ve worked all of this time to get rid of the stigma of mental illness and found the best thing I could do was just talk about it,” she said.

Carter--who has written the book, “Helping Someone With Mental Illness”--oversees the Mental Health Task Force at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

“I read her book over a year ago and told my husband [Walter] I’d love to get her for this dinner,” said Alpha Hahn, event chairwoman. “He said, ‘It doesn’t hurt to try,’ so we kept calling and calling. It worked.”

Quote: “We like to honor people who have made a contribution to mental health. Twenty years ago, when it wasn’t popular to talk about mental illness, [Carter] was out in front,” said Steven Potkin, executive director of the UCI Brain Imaging Center.

Brain work: The Brain Imaging Center, part of the UC Irvine College of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and human behavior, has state-of-the-art imaging technology called Positron Emission Tomography (PET) that enables researchers to see how the brain functions.

“It’s a way of looking inside a living human brain, which no one could ever do before,” said William Bunney, chair of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine who helped start the center 15 years ago.

Researchers use PET for the diagnosis and treatment of such brain diseases as epilepsy, autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia.

Faces: Dee Harvey, who was chosen as the center’s outstanding volunteer; Peggy Goldwater Clay, BIC committee president; Ed and Floss Schumacher, Ralph Cicerone, Aram and Margie Keith, Sandra Brodie, Ron and Marge Norick, Mara Eyer-Hube, Robert and Peggy Sprague, Ray and Gloria Osbrink, Warren and Marion Brown, Jean Liechty, Eric and Lila Nelson and Bob Bonney.

Bottom line: The event was expected to net $30,000. Proceeds will be used for brain imaging scans used for studies not funded by the federal government.

Information for the Brain Imaging Center: (949) 824-7872 or visit the web site at: https://brains .bic.uci.edu.