About
WOW2025 The Mental Health Gala, hosted by UCLA’s Friends of the Semel Institute and the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors, has sold out every year and has been viewed worldwide, including in the United Kingdom, Spain and France. Designed to bring awareness to the global mental health crisis, while supporting mental health research, education and patient care programs at UCLA, WOW has been an overwhelming success.
WOW2025 The Mental Health Gala is scheduled for Wednesday, September 24, 2025, with a special welcome by actor, producer, writer and UCLA Resnick Hospital Board of Advisors member Lisa Kudrow, on the floor of the iconic Crypto.com Arena in Downtown L.A. Honoring entrepreneurs and philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick and the city’s beloved Lakers (more special guests to be announced soon). The highly anticipated event will include stellar conversation with thought leaders at the intersection of science, health and culture – and, of course superstar musical entertainment.
Now more than ever, it’s time to end our era of isolation and loneliness as we repair our city and our population’s external and internal damage — first from COVID-19 and most recently from the L.A. fires. Help us rebuild from the inside out by supporting this world-class community behavioral health resource and sponsoring WOW2025 The Mental Health Gala.
Celebrating the expansion and move of the UCLA Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital to the new UCLA Behavioral Health Campus
- Ranked among the top 5 psychiatric hospitals in the nation by U.S. News & World Report
- Nearly 1-in-20 adults in the U.S. — 13.6 million people — live with serious mental illness
- Only 45% of those with mental health disorders receive appropriate services
- Los Angeles County has 13 inpatient psychiatric beds for every 100,000 people (public health standards call for 50 beds per 100,000)
- Many of UCLA Health’s peers have shuttered their psychiatric wards, contributing to the crisis
- The new hospital will increase inpatient capacity by 61% and will feature a 20-bed psychiatric emergency unit for psychiatric emergencies
Perhaps the greatest challenge to getting help with mental health issues is insufficient access to high-quality behavioral health care. UCLA Health aims to change that by continuing to remove barriers and improve access to mental health care with this landmark investment in service expansion. The new UCLA Behavioral Health Campus, which launches in 2026 with the relocation of the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, will be dedicated to pre-eminent psychiatric and behavioral health care, bringing state-of-the-art treatment to people in need of services. The UCLA Behavioral Health Campus, located in the Mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles, will redefine behavioral health care in L.A. County by significantly expanding regional access to a full spectrum of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services.
WOW Leadership Superstars
Cece Feiler, M.F.T.
Founding Chair, WOW
Chair, UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors
Co-chair, WOW2025
Nancy Glaser, M.D.
Founding Chair, WOW
Founding Chair, UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors
Co-chair, WOW2025
Vicky Goodman
Founding Chair, WOW
Founder and President, Friends of the Semel Institute
Co-chair, WOW2025
Laurie Gordon
Immediate Past Chair, UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors
Chair, UCLA Santa Moncia Medical Center Board of Advisors
Member, The UCLA Foundation Board of Directors
Co-chair, WOW2025
Terry Hyman Hamermesh
Founding Chair, WOW
Nominating and Membership Committee Chair, UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital Board of Advisors
Co-chair, WOW2025
Stephanie Lushing
Vice President, Events, Friends of the Semel Institute
Co-chair, WOW2025
STEWART AND LYNDA RESNICK NEUROPSyCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
The Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA is an independently accredited and licensed hospital that will move from its current Westwood location to anchor the new UCLA Behavioral Health Campus in Mid-Wilshire in 2027. The hospital is among the leading centers in the world for comprehensive patient care, research and education in the fields of mental health, developmental disabilities and neurology. It is the major psychiatric teaching facility of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA has a vision to serve the health care needs of the community, its patients and their families through excellence in research, education and the delivery of exemplary patient care and neuropsychiatric and behavioral health services. The hospital routinely appears among the top ten psychiatric hospitals in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings and is the only hospital west of the Mississippi to be so noted.
Mission of the UCLA Resnick Hospital Board of Advisors
The Resnick Hospital Board of Advisors comprises individuals passionately committed to sustaining, supporting and continually enhancing psychiatric hospital-based services at UCLA for the Los Angeles community in an environment of professional training and scholarship that fosters the clinicians and treatments of the future.
Nationwide, hospital-based psychiatric services are threatened. The total number of freestanding psychiatric hospitals has markedly decreased over time due to reimbursement patterns and economic pressures. Concurrently, outpatient and partial hospitalization programs have not proliferated rapidly enough to make up for the lost inpatient beds. Vital psychiatric care in our community is necessarily provided confidentially outside of the limelight of high-tech, high-profitability medicine. A consequence of this obscurity is that the lifesaving services provided to patients, families and the community often do not grant large-scale recognition of philanthropy. The Resnick Hospital Board of Advisors is instrumental in helping to ensure that Southern California will continue to have world-class, hospital-based psychiatric services.
THE FRIENDS OF THE SEMEL INSTITUTE FOR NEUROSCIENCE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR AT UCLA
The Friends of the Semel Institute is a volunteer organization dedicated to improving the lives of people with mental illness by supporting research to advance innovative treatments and sponsoring educational programs that raise awareness and reduce stigma.
The Friends of the Semel Institute is proud to have an equitable, diverse and inclusive community that has board members and scholar grant recipients of every background. The Friends’ Open Mind community lecture and film series, free to the public, features thoughtful programming that addresses minority issues. The group has sponsored programs on topics such as autism, Alzheimer’s, anxiety disorders, aging, bipolar disorders, PTSD, mental health and the law, schizophrenia and suicide prevention.
The Teen Advisory Council (TAC) of the Friends of the Semel Institute is dedicated to raising awareness, reducing stigma and advocating for the mental health and well-being of high school students by providing opportunities to create meaningful programs that engage, empower and support peers as well as interact with mental health professionals.
In February 2024, TAC curated and presented the inaugural Gen Z Wellness Summit, themed “We Are All in This Together,” at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center. More than 600 people heard inspiring and engaging conversations about issues important to Gen Z: social media, addiction, LGBTQ, climate change, eating disorders, anxiety and depression and relationships. The panel discussions featured social media influencers, a nonprofit founder, an author and podcast host, TAC students and Gen Z mental health advocates. These discussions were moderated by UCLA Semel Institute faculty.
The Friends Scholar Program awards grants to early-career scientists doing vital research to better understand the mind and brain and to develop improved treatments for mental and neurological disorders. The scholars who receive these awards represent the future of the UCLA Semel Institute and, more important, the future of treatment advancement for mental illness. Each year, The Friends awards grants to outstanding postdoctoral fellows or junior faculty doing translational research. To date, over two-dozen scholarships in areas such as eating disorders, ADHD, OCD, addiction, adolescent anxiety, concussion/traumatic brain injury and depression in dementia caregivers have been awarded by The Friends.
friendsofsemelinstitute.org | @UCLASemelFriend