Today 1,500 sons, daughters, fathers and mothers will attempt to take their own lives. Most will have mental health or addiction issues. Many will have both. When one out of four is affected by a mental health disorder, odds are that most of us have friends or family becoming more desperate with every tick of the clock.

There is a way to stop the ticking. Research. We can defeat mental illness by employing the scientific mind to find treatments and cures. But the funding is inadequate for an issue that affects every one of us, the 57 million personally or the rest of us through our family and friends. We have the numbers, but we are not together. With a unified front, we can stop the clock.