No, Brandon Nelson did not have to die.
Brandon Nelson was an outstanding student at Santa Monica High School. (Courtesy of the Nelson family)
On its own, that fact might drive those who loved Nelson to the edge of sanity. But as 26-year-old’s death laid bare horrific holes in California’s mental healthcare system — especially in the enormously lucrative, poorly regulated, private-pay slice of that system — his parents have channeled their agony and rage into an effort to spare others from the same.
Rose and Allen Nelson are giving $2.4 million to UCLA Health to establish the Brandon Nelson Fellowship in Translational and Clinical Neuroscience at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
The endowed fellowship aims to build a bridge between lab and clinical practice, cultivating leaders eager to understand the biology and clinical treatment of serious mental illness, UCLA officials said.
It will support advanced neuropsychiatry research focused on psychosis, bipolar disorder and other conditions, with an eye to developing treatments that can prevent, or change the course of, such conditions.
“A grain of sand in an infinite beach of research that’s needed to figure it out — but they’re making incredible progress,” said Allen Nelson. “When you see the labs, it’s just amazing. On the neurobiology side, they’re able to see into brain tissue all the way down to the cellular level, to DNA, to understand how all of it may fit together.”
With the computing power coming on line, and with AI, researchers soon may be able to link combinations of genes that contribute to different mental health conditions. Once that’s understood, it could lead to new treatments and interventions.
It won’t be long, the Nelsons hope, until researchers crack the code.
Tragedy
Rose and Allen Nelson hold an urn of their son Brandon’s ashes at their Santa Monica home on Sunday, October 21, 2018. Brandon died last March at age 26 after hanging himself in an unlicensed Sovereign Health home. Rose wears Brandon’s crosses. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Money for the fellowship comes from an $11 million settlement, awarded to the Nelsons, in the wake of a wrongful death lawsuit they filed in 2019 against defunct Sovereign Health/Dual Diagnosis and its principal, Tonmoy Sharma.
A year prior to the suit, Brandon Nelson suffered a psychotic break and was promised top-notch care from a professional mental health team at Orange County’s Sovereign/Dual Diagnosis, including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, etc. But that team actually included men with experience in furniture moving and construction and credit card processing and house painting, who took online CPR classes. They were too freaked out by Brandon Nelson’s body dangling from the ceiling to recall the address for the 911 dispatcher, according to trial transcripts.
The company they worked for, Sovereign Health, was imploding financially. Workers were fleeing. The “facility” where Sovereign placed Nelson was little more than a tract house in San Clemente that emergency workers described as a “sober living home mental health facility.” No one “treating” Nelson on the day he died had any clue about his medical history, his psychotic breaks, or his desire to end his life.
The prescriptions for the anti-psychotic medications Nelson required twice daily were slow to be filled and forgotten on a desk in a corporate office. Nelson hadn’t taken them for nearly 24 hours and was howling and crying, “I want my meds! I want my meds!” just hours before he used a pair of sweatpants to hang himself from the sprinkler system in his room.
Brandon Nelson played on the varsity football team at Santa Monica High School. (Courtesy of the Nelson family)
Brandon Nelson was a UCLA graduate in 2014. His death eventually helped bring about “Brandon’s Law,” passed in 2021, which prohibits health care companies from misrepresenting or making blatantly false claims about the services they offer or where they’re located.
Sharma was arrested in May and charged with eight counts of insurance fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice said Sharma’s companies made $149 million worth of fraudulent claims; ran up $29 million in unnecessary urinalysis tests; and paid more than $21 million in illegal kickbacks to so-called “body brokers” who steered insured drug users to his clinics. Sharma has pleaded not guilty.
‘Change the course’
The Nelsons won’t stop advocating for a better mental health care system. As they pondered how to allocate the settlement money, they weighed three different areas needing help:
Facilities that care for people with serious mental illness. Professionals such as psychiatrists and psychologists (there aren’t enough legitimate providers, which allows fraudsters to exploit people who need help, Allen Nelson said). And research into why the brain misfires.
“If you can do the last one — if you can find cures — then you don’t have to worry about the others,” he said.
Rose and Allen Nelson display mementos of their eldest son, Brandon, including words he wrote as a child about his curiosity and excitement for the world, at their Santa Monica home. Brandon committed suicide at age 26, in an unlicensed Sovereign Health home where he was supposed to be receiving treatment for mental illness. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
So that’s where they decided to start. But they’re not done. The Nelsons will stay on the front lines, trying to convince legislators to rein in what they term a “shadow industry,” and do a simple thing that could protect the most vulnerable people: Require private programs to adhere to the same quality standards as public programs.
UCLA’s Semel Institute is one of the premier centers for brain research, Allen Nelson said, and Brandon would be pleased that his tragedy will help alleviate the painful impact that serious mental illness can have for others. The fellowship will help create a “bench-to-bedside interdisciplinary training environment for physician- and nonphysician-neuroscientists to link genetics, neurobiology and neurodevelopmental processes with clinical research,” officials said.
It will be administered by UCLA Health and the Semel Institute, partly under the leadership of Dr. Stephen Marder, a distinguished professor in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Others leading the work include Michael Green, a distinguished UCLA professor in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences; and Dr. Daniel Geschwind, UCLA’s Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry.
Rose and Allen Nelson of Santa Monica hold a picture of their son Brandon Nelson in 2018. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Johnese Spisso, president of the UCLA Health System, said the fellowship will have far-reaching impact on the career paths of a new generation of investigators “who can connect genetic and basic neuroscience discovery to the development of clinical interventions.”
“This was a terrible situation that didn’t have to happen,” added UCLA psychiatrist Marder, whose research focuses on improving the pharmacological and psychosocial treatment of schizophrenia, in a prepared statement.
“It is our hope that the advanced research made possible by the Brandon Nelson Fellowship will result in better understanding of serious mental illness and the discovery of treatments to prevent and change the course.”