Policy is where good intentions go to become actionable, or where they go to die. There's no middle ground.
Aileen Rice Jones, who works in policy at Boehringer Ingelheim, sees this clearly. Because she sits at the intersection of what pharma can do and what patients actually need. And those two things are often completely misaligned.
Here's what most people don't understand about mental health policy: it's written by committees that have never experienced what they're regulating. A room full of administrators deciding how depression should be treated, without a single person in that room who's lived with major depressive disorder.
You can feel the difference. Policies written this way are always slightly off. They're efficient, well-intentioned, and useless.
Aileen's argument is simpler: include patients. Not in a tokenistic way. Not as a focus group brought in to validate decisions already made. But as actual policymakers. People whose lived experience is the starting data, not the afterthought.
What shifts when you do this? Everything.
A policy written by a room of MDs without patient input might focus on medication compliance. A policy written with someone who lives with depression will also focus on: access to therapy, job protection during treatment, how to disclose at work, what actually happens when you can't get out of bed, how stigma makes everything worse.
That second policy solves problems. The first one just measures whether people are taking pills.
The mental health space needs more of Aileen's thinking. Because right now, policy is written as though patients are objects to be optimized, rather than experts in their own experience.
I've spent enough time in policy rooms to know this: the moment you add someone with lived experience, everyone else gets smarter. Because suddenly you're not theorizing. You're solving real problems. You're measuring success by whether people's lives actually improve, not by whether compliance metrics go up.
That's radical. And that's exactly what needs to happen.
Listen to the full conversation: How public policy can change the mental health space with Aileen Rice Jones on Chronically.