The family matched the gift of $2.4 million to bridge the gap between biology, psychiatry and medicine

No, Brandon Nelson didn’t have to die.

In itself, that fact might drive those who love Nelson to the edge of sanity. But as the 26-year-old’s death left a terrible hole in California’s mental health care system — especially in that system’s highly profitable, poorly regulated, private pay system — his parents channeled their pain and anger to get rid of others.

Rose and Alan Nelson are giving UCLA Health $2.4 million to establish the Brandon Nelson Fellowship in Translational and Clinical Neuroscience at the Semalt Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

The purpose of the awarded fellowship is to build a bridge between the laboratory and clinical practice, creating leaders who are interested in understanding the biology and clinical treatment of serious mental illnesses, UCLA officials said.

It will support advanced neuropsychiatric research on psychosis, bipolar disorder and other conditions, with an eye toward developing treatments that can prevent or reverse such conditions.

“It’s a grain of sand on an infinite beach of research that’s needed to figure this out – but they’re making incredible progress,” said Alan Nelson. “When you see the labs, it’s just amazing. On the neurobiology side, they can look at brain tissue from the cellular level down to the DNA, to understand how it all comes together.”

With computing power coming in line, and with AI, researchers will soon be able to link combinations of genes that contribute to various mental health conditions. Once understood, this could lead to new treatments and interventions.

It won’t be long, Nelson hopes, until researchers crack the code.

the tragedy

Funding for the fellowship comes from an $11 million settlement awarded to the Nelsons, as a result of a wrongful-death lawsuit they filed in 2019 against Autonomic Health/Dual Diagnosis and its principal, Tunmoy Sharma.

A year before the trial, Brandon Nelson was diagnosed with mental illness and was promised high-level care by a professional mental health team at Orange County’s Dominant/Dual Diagnosis, including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and others. But the team actually consisted of men with experience in moving furniture and home construction and online classes in painting and credit card classes. They were too frightened by Brandon Nelson’s body hanging from the ceiling to remember the 911 dispatcher’s address, according to court filings.

The company they worked for, Sovereign Health, was suffering financially. The workers fled. The “facility” where Governor Nelson was placed was little more than a tract home in San Clemente that emergency workers described as a “light living home mental health facility.” No one knew anything about Nelson’s “treatment” on the day he died, his medical history, his mental breakdown, or the end of his life.

The prescriptions for the antipsychotics that Nelson needed twice a day were slow to be filled and forgotten on the desk in the corporate office. Nelson didn’t take them for almost 24 hours and screamed and cried, “I want my medicine! I want my medicine!” Just hours earlier he had used a pair of sweatpants to hang himself from the sprinkler system in his bedroom.

Brandon Nelson graduated from UCLA in 2014. His death eventually helped bring about Brandon’s Law, passed in 2021, which prohibits health care companies from making false claims about the services they offer or where they are located.

Sharma was arrested in May and charged with eight counts of insurance fraud. The US Department of Justice said Sharma’s companies made $149 million worth of fraudulent claims; $29 million in unnecessary urine tests; And more than $21 million in illegal payments to so-called “body brokers” who drove drug policyholders to their clinics. Sharma does not admit his guilt.

‘change course’

Nelson will continue to advocate for a better mental health care system. As they thought about how to allocate the settlement money, they weighed three different areas that needed help:

Facilities that care for people with serious mental illnesses. Professionals like psychiatrists and psychologists (there aren’t enough legitimate providers, which allows fraudsters to take advantage of people who need help, said Alan Nelson). And research why the brain goes wrong.

“If you can do the latter – if you find a cure – then you don’t have to worry about the rest,” he said.

So that’s where they decided to start. But they are not done. Nelson will remain on the front lines, trying to convince lawmakers to stop relying on what they call the “shadow industry” and do one simple thing that could protect the most vulnerable: Require private programs to adhere to the same quality standards as public programs.

The UCLA Brain Institute is one of the world’s leading centers for brain research, and Brandon would be happy that his tragedy will help reduce the painful impact that serious mental illness has on others, said Allen Nelson. The fellowship will help create a bench-to-bedside learning environment for physicians and nonphysician-neuroscientists to connect genetics, neurobiology and neurodevelopmental processes to clinical research, officials said.

It will be administered by the UCLA Health and Wellness Institute, in part under the leadership of Dr. Stephen Marder, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Others leading the work include Michael Green, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences; and Dr. Daniel Geschwind, UCLA’s Gordon and Virginia McDonald Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry.

Janice Spesso, president of the UCLA Health System, said the partnership will have a far-reaching impact on the career paths of a new generation of investigators “who can connect genetic and basic neuroscience discoveries to the development of clinical interventions.”

“It was a horrible situation that didn’t have to happen,” added Marder, a UCLA psychiatrist whose research focuses on improving pharmacological and psychosocial treatments for schizophrenia, in a prepared statement.

“It is our hope that the research advanced by the Brandon Nelson Fellowship may lead to a better understanding of serious mental illness and the discovery of treatments to prevent and reverse its course.”