Elizabeth's inspiring story of how she overcame years of depression triggered by the murder of her daughter and subsequent death of her husband is featured in our 2011 annual report video series.

The release earlier this month of our second national poll, “Silver and Blue: The Unfinished Business of Mental Health and Older Americans,” capped a year in which the John A. Hartford Foundation has focused a spotlight on mental health issues.

We made mental health and older adults the focus of our award-winning 2011 annual report, and we brought the stories of real people we told in the pages of the report to life in a series of captivating videos that ran throughout the fall.

In case you missed any of them, I’ve gathered them together here to help you appreciate the extraordinary courage, passion, and determination so many older adults and those who love them show every day in the face of devastating circumstances and illnesses, as well as the amazing work being done by teams of committed, caring health professionals to improve their lives and provide hope for an even better future:

As we prepare to greet another new year, our work continues. We are now awaiting letters of intent to apply for grant funding that will allow us to expand IMPACT—an evidence-based model of depression treatment—into five, largely rural states for which the University of Washington is the only medical school: Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. The deadline for non-profit, primary care community health clinics in that region to submit the letters has been extended into the new year, until Jan. 9.

In the coming year, we will make awards to five to eight community health centers across this region—which constitutes almost 30 percent of the U.S. landmass—to adopt the model. As Chris Langston recently wrote, “Over time, we expect that our local bastions of innovation will both sustain the work they have started and spread the model further across the region.”

As the results of our recent poll clearly showed, the hard work of improving mental health care for older adults takes time. Rest assured, we at the Hartford Foundation are in this for the long run.

Best wishes for a happy—and healthy—new year.