Paul and Diana Huffman’s 2026 hike for mental health

Paul: I have been hiking for this charity event since it first started 15 years ago! (Thanks to Diana). As always, I am hiking in memory of my brother Kurt who had schizophrenia. One of the goals of HFMF is reduce the stigma of mental illness, and I think that has been improving over the last 15 years. I see more talk on media about mental health and illness. I’m sure that there is plenty of stigma still out there, but I am heartened that people seem more free to talk about it. And we should! The real minority is someone who has never been affected by mental illness in themselves, or a family member or a friend. And if you are reading this and thinking “Not me!”, well my guess is that you do know someone how suffered from mental illness at some point in their life, but nobody every told you. Mental illness is the misery that does *not* love company. 

The main goal of HFMH is to fund research into mental illness, in hopes of finding problems sooner and finding better treatments. My family did family therapy and it helped us with each other and with Kurt. I am not sure what Kurt got out of it, but I think our empathy helped smooth the rough spots for him and for us. Kurt didn’t have much joy in his life and was utterly alone in his head, even though he always lived with some family. But what if there had been a way to tell he could become schizophrenic back when he was seven years old? And what if there was a treatment that he could have had then that would have reduced or eliminated his symptoms? Who could he have been? And would he have had more joy? That’s the reason I am hiking Mt Washington – so that a kid like my brother doesn’t have to go through what my brother did.

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