 My name is Bobby Jo Yarborough. I'm a clinical psychologist and I study how to improve care and outcomes for people with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. About 10 million people live with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or other major mental illnesses that can substantially interfere with their ability to participate fully in community life, in relationships, in school and work. There's been a long-standing misconception that people with serious mental illnesses cannot recover. The research, including some work of my own, tells a different story. We know that people with serious mental illnesses can recover, and in fact about two-thirds typically do. We know a lot more about the kinds of services and supports that people need in order to recover. So a goal of my work is to help providers who interact with people with serious mental illnesses to understand the hope of recovery and to improve health care for people with these conditions. An important component of recovery for many people with serious mental illnesses involves taking anti-psychotic medications. Anti-psychotics come with a long list of nasty side effects, among them substantial weight gain. With obesity comes greater risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And so we developed a lifestyle change program for people with serious mental illnesses or taking anti-psychotic medications. We modified a conventional behavioral weight loss program and specifically tailored it for this population. And to many people's surprise, it worked. People who received the intervention, they improved their diet, they lost weight, they reduced their diabetes risks by improving their glucose control, they reduced their medical hospitalizations. So that program is now being implemented in the United States and also internationally. In addition to my research related to serious mental illnesses, I also study opioid use disorders. There's been a lot in the media lately about opioids, and we know that some people who take opioids long term for the management of chronic pain can end up with some pretty bad outcomes, including abuse or misuse of opioids, addiction or overdose. And so we have two ongoing studies that are really seeking to quantify the magnitude of those risks and to also identify who is most vulnerable for those risks. I met my husband at the Center for Health Research many years ago, and we have been fortunate to know a number of people, both through our personal and professional lives, who live with serious mental illnesses or substance use disorders. And some of them have allowed us to walk alongside them as they seek recovery. Those experiences, as much or more than my formal graduate training, have really equipped and prepared me for this research work and have really influenced the way that I think and the way that I work and who I feel like I'm working for.