From Tragedy, a Gift of Hope

A passion for mental health care can come from many sources: intellectual curiosity, firsthand experience with an illness, or perhaps the struggles of a loved one. For Charmaine and Gordon McGill, witnessing those struggles — and navigating the parents’ worst nightmare that followed, twice over — created a deep and enduring dedication to changing how mental illness is understood and treated.

The couple saw their only children, sons Frank and Parker, not only struggle with but ultimately lose their lives to depression and addiction issues. Frank died in 2009 at age 20 by suicide after years of what he saw as a hopeless struggle against addiction. His older brother, Parker, died in 2018 at age 36 of a fentanyl-laced accidental drug overdose during his battle against addiction.

“We’ve been very open and honest about our children’s journeys,” Charmaine says. “It’s through their struggles that we’ve been on our own journey as grieving parents.”

That journey doesn’t end with their sons’ deaths or their own heartbreak. It ends with hope and a remarkable gift to spare other families the same heartbreak. Through the Cain Foundation, their family foundation, the McGills have channeled their grief into support for Dell Medical School’s Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The center, which they have previously supported, will now bear their names.

“In all the years that I have been active in the foundation, there was nothing to which I wanted to put body, mind and spirit to until now. This is calling to me. It’s taken our hearts and our souls,” Charmaine says. “If psychedelic therapy had been available, I really believe that my children could have lived. It would have been life changing, and our lives would have been vastly different.”

Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., is chair of Dell Med’s psychiatry department and co-director of the McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy with Greg Fonzo, Ph.D. He’s seen psychedelic compounds as a mental health therapy break into the public consciousness, along with new scientific studies and widespread anecdotal evidence of unprecedented success in relieving treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

“But there is a lack of scientifically rigorous studies to guide us as to what conditions psychedelics are most helpful for and, most importantly, who with those conditions might most benefit from them,” he says. “Therefore, there’s a great unmet need, and psychedelics may well fill that need for many people.”

Charmaine sees that as one of the lessons she and Gordon learned from their sons’ battles with depression and addiction.

“We learned so much through their addictions,” she says. “They’ve given us this gift — that realizing traditional medicines don’t work for many people and that psychedelic therapeutics can change the entire landscape for those suffering from treatment-resistant mental health issues. I believe we now owe this gift to others.”

The National Institutes of Health, the major federal funding agency for biomedical research, has conducted some animal studies of psychedelics but has been reluctant to fund human studies, Nemeroff says.

“In the absence of federal funding for clinical studies, gifts such as the McGills’ are groundbreaking because they allow us to move forward with studies that we couldn’t otherwise conduct,” he says. “The McGills are very forward-thinking individuals.”

As a result of the high regard they hold for veterans, Charmaine and Gordon have sponsored many veterans who have sought psychedelic treatments, both through Dell Med and other veterans programs.

“Since that time, I made sure to put in a word to administrators, legislators, and governors that we needed a medical school at UT,” Denius said in an interview with Dell Med published in May 2018. “It’s never left my panoramic view of the University.”

Fast-forward to 2011. When plans for a medical school at UT Austin began to take shape, the Board of Regents approved the establishment of the Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean’s Chair in Medical Leadership, endowed by a gift from the Cain Foundation. In 2014, the endowment was transferred from the President’s Office to Dell Medical School. It was the first designated Distinguished University Chair at The University of Texas at Austin — and one of the first gifts to the University’s medical school.

An important part of Denius’ early vision for his beloved UT Austin was that a world-class university needed a world-class medical school.

“The University of Texas is a very prestigious, high-profile university not only in Texas, or even the nation but in the world,” Denius said in the Dell Med interview. “We want to accomplish the same thing for our medical school.”

“A medical school was his dream for the University,” Charmaine says. “And he lived to see that dream fulfilled.”

A new chapter in the family’s dream began in August 2023 with the announcement of The University of Texas Medical Center. This academic health system will include a new UT Austin tertiary hospital and an MD Anderson Cancer Center, with both facilities scheduled to open in 2030. (A tertiary hospital provides highly specialized medical care for complex conditions.)

Claudia Lucchinetti, M.D., Dell Med’s dean and UT’s senior vice president for medical affairs, leads development of the UT Medical Center. She holds the Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean’s Chair in Medical Leadership.

“The University of Texas Medical Center is yet another transformative step in realizing the vision that Frank Denius committed to early on in his support of UT Austin,” Lucchinetti says. “The ability to continue growing an integrated, patient-centered academic medicine footprint will improve the lives of patients and communities in Central Texas and beyond. With expanded access to treatment for complex conditions in our new UT tertiary hospital, world-class care at MD Anderson’s new cancer center, and impactful medical discovery across the UT campus, we are truly building a health care destination that will improve lives for generations to come.”

Beyond their passions for veterans’ issues and innovations in mental health care throughout the UT System, the McGills felt moved to give because of the people at the psychedelic center at Dell Med and at UT Austin.

“The leadership here is a major factor,” Gordon says. “Dr. Nemeroff and Dr. Fonzo are truly outstanding leaders in mental health. And Dean Lucchinetti, think of all that she accomplished while at Mayo Clinic where she had an unparalleled history of success, and the people coming to the UT Medical Center because of her. It’s incredibly impressive. We’re just excited and honored to be a part of this.”

“Dell Med’s faculty, students, patients and community have been fortunate to benefit from the long-standing and generous support of the Denius and McGill families,” Lucchinetti says. “This investment in the critically important field of treatment innovation for mental health conditions is just the most recent demonstration of their significant impact on life-changing — and saving — health care. We are grateful for their confidence in our teams and continued partnership with the McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy. Together, we will ensure that other families will not have to endure the grief of losing children and loved ones to mental illness.”

“The development of the UT Medical Center is driving Austin’s transformation into a world-class destination for innovation in health and life sciences. The McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy’s groundbreaking mission illustrates how UT and Dell Medical School are bringing systematic transformation to the field,” says UT President Jay Hartzell. 

“We are profoundly grateful for the vision and generosity of the Denius and McGill families,” Hartzell says. “They have transformed their grief into an opportunity to make a life-changing difference for individuals and families impacted by mental illness throughout the world. Their commitment creates vast new opportunities for UT to disrupt and transform health care and offers a fitting tribute to the possibilities that their family envisioned here decades ago.”

The UT Medical Center will draw on the University’s computing might to become a digitally enabled hospital of the future. One exciting aspect of that for Nemeroff is the power of artificial intelligence to accelerate research exponentially.

“This is the year of AI, the decade of AI, the era of AI,” he says. “For the first time, we’ll be able to take hundreds, even thousands, of variables and determine their collective impact on an outcome.”

Human limitations have usually meant studying a single variable such as genetics or family history. At the most, four variables would be in play.

“But with AI we’ll be able to look at all of the variables,” Nemeroff says. “And that’s very, very powerful.”

Both UT Austin alums, the McGills say they’re confident in their investment in the psychedelic center because of the University’s cross-campus expertise in complementary disciplines as diverse as natural sciences, pharmacology, engineering, law, communication and business.

“All the resources that are here can be utilized by the psychedelic center, and in turn the center can open entirely new vistas for virtually every part of the University and much further,” Gordon says. “The psychedelic center embodies the driving force of the University’s brand statement that declares, ‘What starts here changes the world.’ That’s what’s exciting.”

But that’s not all that makes the McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy strong.

“We have quality investigators both on the basic neuroscience side with Lief Fenno and Jennifer Donegan and on the clinical side with Greg Fonzo and Manoj Doss, as well as a cadre of junior residents and medical students who are very invested,” Nemeroff says.

The McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy is also distinct because it is exploring treatments that combine psychedelic drugs with brain modulation techniques such as transcranial focused ultrasound and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

And they insist that the center must be inclusive in garnering support and collaborative in its efforts so that the entire field of psychedelic research and therapy advances rapidly. Reaching out and giving credit to others for their contributions, in whatever form, are critical elements of their vision for the success of the center.

What does the nation’s top psychedelic research center look like?

“Being the preeminent center would mean we would be at the cutting edge of both basic neuroscience research on the mechanism of action of psychedelics that still remain obscure and also on the cutting edge of clinical research,” Nemeroff says.

For Charmaine, that means more people quickly finding more effective treatments with longer-lasting relief from treatment-resistant mental illness. 

“There are so many people who need a far better alternative to traditional therapies,” she says. “My goal is that everyone who can be helped by psychedelic therapeutics have this available as an alternative. After all, the core purpose of the University is to ‘transform lives for the benefit of society,’ and that is exactly what I expect the psychedelic center to do.”

Charmaine thinks about the loved ones she’s lost and what they might think about their gift to the McGill Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy.

“Dad had a knack for spotting big opportunities,” she says. “I know he would like this because the psychedelic center has the potential to change the world and that it started right here at The University of Texas at Austin.

“As for my children, I can see Parker and Frank high-fiving me. It’s been life-changing for me; it could have been life-saving for them.

“Now, with our grateful thanks for the support of our family, the Cain Foundation, the University, and everyone who is supporting the psychedelic center, I know that we can make it life-changing for others.”