Like the pharmaceutical researcher sitting next to me, many neuroscientists probably only went to see the actress Glenn Close open the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in San Diego, California, because nothing else was really going on yet. “Most people here want to go talk about whatever molecule or pathway they are working on,” he said. No doubt some were there for a brush with fame, a chance to see an Emmy and Golden Globe award winning actress (and five-time Oscar nominee) in the flesh.

But Close was there as a founder of the not-for-profit organization, Bring Change 2 Mind, which campaigns against the stigma of mental illness. She explained that she was from a “neuroscience family”, often reading the jargon laden titles of her daughter’s and son-in-law’s brain studies. She is also the first named woman to have her entire diploid genome sequence read in full.

Close was then joined by her sister Jesse, and Calen Pick, Jesse’s son. Jesse, a bipolar sufferer or “consumer,” as psychiatric disease patients are referred to within the mental health community, and Calen, a schizoaffective consumer, were the reasons Glenn Close started Bring Change 2 Mind.

Pick gave a sombre talk about his experiences — describing how he once thought he was Jesus, how he used to think that the television was trying to convey messages to him, how he thought the examinations he was undergoing were an attempt to decide whether he was God or the devil. He showed his paintings: impressive faces in sickly oranges or greens that expressed pain, joy, confusion.

In contrast, his mother Jesse was in a joking mood, whether reminiscing about her “lunatic of a great uncle who got naked and rode a horse across the plains” (manic, before such diagnoses were made), or speaking about how her cycles of mania and depression had, for the most of her life, “driven away everything important”—including 5 husbands. “I had an aunt Eleanor who married six times," she said. "I always wanted to break her record but I can’t do it. I’m just too tired.”

Despite the jokes, Jesse’s message was serious and targeted squarely to the crowd: their research figuring out how the brain works is vital, and medically urgent. As Glenn Close put it: “You’re saving lives. Thank you.”