Mädchen Amick did everything young. “I left home at 16 with stars in my eyes, went to Hollywood, and got Elite Models and a talent group to commit to signing me if I came back at 16 emancipated,” she says. “So then, I went home with a whole plan.”
You might know Amick from the “Twin Peaks” series – the late, great David Lynch gave her a big break in 1987. She continually worked in Hollywood on indie films and TV shows like “Baywatch,” “Star Trek,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Gossip Girl,” and – more recently – “Riverdale.” Her long and varied career kept her busy, and now she’s adding the role of director to her resume.
As busy as she was, working in film, television, and music videos, Amick also became a mom at a young age. She and her husband of 30 years, David Alexis, have two grown children together – Mina and Sylvester. Their son was named for the brilliant musician Sly Stone. (Interest in his career is high now, thanks to a new documentary by Questlove of The Roots.) Sly, who is now in his early 30s, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2012, following a traumatic experience in college. An ongoing mental health journey deeply impacted Amick and her family.
They moved to the Coachella Valley after many years of treatment challenges and achievements. One thing was clear; they needed to harness their collective knowledge and experience to help others who are going through the minefield of mental health and addiction treatment.
“When my son was hit with this mental illness that seemed to have come into my family out of nowhere, it just pulled the rug out from underneath us,” Amick says, discussing her family’s odyssey. “And it immediately made me want to share our story and use my platform for good, more than just being an actress in the business. I thought that by sharing our story, I would be able to, at least, help others not feel alone, help break the stigma, and just start to get information out as we were navigating.”
Amick says her family fell in love with the Coachella Valley pre-pandemic, when Sly was deep in treatment and recovery mode. The area is known internationally for helping people in recovery. But, Amick and her family didn't know at the time that the area is saturated with substance use disorder treatments, which are often paired with treatment of mental health issues. Amick muses about the state of mental health care in the U.S. She laments that treatment options are “really lacking in primary mental health. A lot of places say they're dual diagnosis, but they're barely touching the primary mental health issues and diagnoses of their clients.” She mentions the country’s “broken healthcare system” and says that it was incredibly hard to get the support and attention that Sly needed, despite her family’s resources and contacts.
Amick says there are “just not enough resources available. And the ones that are available are absolutely unattainable [and] unaffordable. I had Screen Actors Guild insurance, which is known to be a great health plan for those that qualify. And yet, at the time, no mental health care was covered.”
Balancing medication and counseling can be nuanced and take time plus a lot of accompanying care and support. Out of Sly’s crisis, an idea was born – to create a holistic treatment center that the family envisioned would help with his medical journey. Normalizing and destigmatizing the issue of mental health was the first hurdle.
During a harrowing manic episode that occurred 10 years after Sly was diagnosed, Amick’s family realized that options for mental health treatment were getting worse and harder to access. So, they decided to start a non-profit organization called the Don’t MiND Me Foundation in May 2021. Navigating from all sides of the lived experience, the family decided on a bold name with multiple meanings. It combines the idea of “accept me for who I am” with their goal to affect dramatic policy change regarding mental illness.
Paul Linde is a clinician and professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine. He was impressed with the ambitious scope of the project and spoke about how much it is needed. “The program's biggest strength would be providing continuity of integrated care, under one roof, for patients with co-occurring psychiatric and substance use disorders when discharged from either a medical or a psychiatric hospital,” he said. “It offers a full spectrum of care ranging from residential treatment to an intensive outpatient program to outpatient wraparound services. This approach results in an improved quality of care and patient satisfaction compared to treatment as usual, which often involves a separate stop for each level of care."
Sly is doing well today and has been sober for nearly two years. But, his journey had lots of ups and downs. The entire Amick family works with the foundation, and Sly is a certified peer specialist with a passion for patient advocacy. He’s worked with a few different programs that let him serve as an advocate for patients and act as a liaison between patients and a treatment team.
“It's a really important layer to someone's recovery,” Amick says. She reports that Sly looks forward to working with Don’t MiND Me’s future treatment center in Palm Springs. Mina, his sister, is very involved with the administration aspect of the foundation. She works as its communications director and is responsible for social media, outreach, networking, and partnerships, including becoming official partners with the Tour de Palm Springs.
The family plans to build a treatment and recovery center that can provide integrative care including crisis intervention, a sobering center, and a police for patients to detox. Amick talks about the gap between acute psychiatric hospitals and the few residential treatment facilities that are available in the area. She believes that many patients are discharged too early, when they are not stable. And it’s difficult for patients to access insurance coverage.
Amick and her family are considering transforming the Desert Sun building into an outpatient and residential treatment facility. She says members of the Palm Springs Police Officers’ Association are excited about the plans. They recognize that the planned treatment center will help the police department address the fact that jails and the mental health care system are overwhelmed.
The family seeks to include men, women, non-binary people, members of the LGBTQ community, families with children, and people with pets at the treatment center. They are also conscious about the mental health care needs of veterans and Native Americans. They plan to offer a long-term residential program.
“It takes a while for your brain to heal,” Amick says. “It takes a while to get a correct diagnosis, the correct medications, etc.” So, they want to provide a long-term approach to mental health care that includes nutritional education, vocational skills, and a variety of therapies that can help patients recover.
They are working to acquire a grant and want to include treatment for Medi-Cal patients. With support from law enforcement officials, the Department of Defense, and the American Psychiatric Association, they hope to treat more than 450 patients at a time.
A gala fundraiser for Don’t MiND Me occurred at the Palm Springs Air Museum on March 8. More than 250 people attended the event. The foundation’s three core pillars of Advocacy, Action, and Access were on display, as the organization continually seeks to connect patients and families with resources. Molly Ringwald (Amick’s co-star on “Riverdale”) received an Advocacy Award.
Other celebrities were involved, including Lance Bass, Jolie Fisher, and some actors from “Twin Peaks.” They joined Amick on stage to speak about their late mentor, David Lynch. His foundation has offered much-needed free transcendental meditation sessions to residents affected by wildfires in LA.
Amick says she’s always been a reluctant celebrity, and working for the Don’t MiND Me Foundation is cathartic. She says she can see herself really leaning into advocacy work. But, she is also a storyteller who wants to create good mental health stories and normalize and de-villainize mental illness. “It makes me so angry when I see a movie and we still have the bad guys who have schizophrenia or something,” she says. She travels to Washington, DC often to speak about the issue.
She continues to act, direct, and participate in the desert community. She would like to eventually open treatment facilities in different locations across the U.S. “We hope to be the example and the pilot program for the rest of the nation,” Amick says with enthusiasm. “How can we use our Medicaid/Medicare system and actually make it accessible and have enough services available for everyone to use?”
