By any standard, the 13th Staglin Family Music Festival for Mental Health was a huge success.

During the September event, 500 donors and friends raised more than $4 million for research into the causes of mental disease and potential cures. The total raised so far by the event is now more than $53 million including direct gifts and leveraged grants. It’s America’s most successful wine charity event without an auction.

The attendees paid $300 to attend a reception featuring some of the west’s most famed wines and appetizers created by Redd’s Richard Reddington. The wines included such cult favorites as Abreu Vineyards, Bond, Colgin Cellars, Flowers, Harlan Estate, Scarecrow, Screaming Eagle, Shafer, Vineyard 29 and Williams Selyem.

This was followed by a lively concert and dancing by R&B legend Gladys Knight and her 24-piece band playing her classic hits like “The Best Thing to Ever Happen to Me” and “Midnight Train to Georgia.”

About 300 who attended also spent $3,500 for a five-course dinner prepared by Chef Rick Moonen.

Co-hosts Shari and Garen Staglin welcomed the guests, who included Lt. Governor John Garamendi, lnd Rep. Mike Thompson, D- St. Helena. The Staglins announced that Karen and Jerry Callaghan were the Festival's second member of the “Million Dollar Club.” Peter T. Paul became the first million-dollar supporter in 2006. 

With all the fun, the festival has a very serious purpose: helping understand and cure mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and psychosis — and removing the stigma attached to mental illness as it becomes clear that physical causes lie at its roots.

The funds the Staglins have raised are starting to have significant impact. Dr. Ty Cannon, Phd, UCLA Department of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences said that as a result of the support of the Staglin Festival, UCLA’s Interdisciplinary Research Consortium will receive a $14.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“The Music Festival’s funding of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience was instrumental in the development of the pilot data that helped us obtain this award,” Cannon said. “At a minimum, roughly half of the overall funding, or about $7.3 million, pertains directly to the schizophrenia/bipolar work we conducted through the funds we received from the Music Festival. Without that initial research, we would have not likely been awarded this additional funding for this important research.”

In addition to the UCLA Interdisciplinary Research Consortium grant, the Staglins announced that even more grant money has been awarded in 2007, based on the direct seed money that the Music Festival awarded in the past. The total of additional funds awarded in 2007 is $17.5 million, with the combined total raised in 2007 from direct and leveraged gifts in excess of $21 million. 

Tom Insel, the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health put this “venture philanthropy” in perspective: “Most of our investment is in late-stage, well-developed research projects that have enough preliminary data to pass peer review. But we also need early phase studies that may be powered by an innovative idea but lack preliminary data, and we recognize these studies will be vital for future breakthroughs in mental health. Fortunately, the critical need for funding these early phase studies is being filled by philanthropic organizations, such as the Staglin Foundation.”

“Shari and Garen Staglin have had a galvanizing effect on mental health research that is almost impossible to quantify,” said Sophia Vinogradov, a researcher at University of California at San Francisco.

With all of the festival expenses underwritten by its sponsors, all proceeds go directly to scientific research and treatment programs, including those at UCSF, Stanford University, UCLA, University of Southern Florida, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the Roskamp Institute studying Alzheimer’s, as well as research awards through NARSAD (National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression) plus Aldea, Inc. of Napa and Sonoma.

The program for the Music Festival began with a scientific symposium open to the public at which Dr. Shitij Kapur of the University of London spoke on how scientists are using brain imaging techniques to find the links between brain chemistry, thought and emotion, leading to new treatments for mental disorders.

He reiterated what is becoming clear: Mental illness seems to result from a combination of impaired, or at least atypical, genes combined with environmental effects. So far, however, we can only treat symptoms such as depression, or suppress hallucinations, not cure or prevent the disease. That’s the focus of scientific studies funded by the festival.

At the conclusion of his lecture, Kapur joined Shari and Garen Staglin to present the $250,000 Staglin Family/NARSAD Schizophrenia “Rising Star” research award to Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., from Johns Hopkins University. Sawa’s work is improving our knowledge of a gene, which, when impaired, may be a root of schizophrenia.    

Next year’s festival will be held on Sept. 13, at the Staglin Family Vineyard in Rutherford

For further information, call 944-0477, e-mail info@staglinfamily.com or visit www.music-festival.org.