Bill Smith ’96 is thinking about his mental health – and yours, too – as a matter of public policy. In May 2020, he launched Inseparable, a coalition organization with a simple but ambitious agenda – increasing access to care, advocating for research, investing in prevention and early intervention, and driving a comprehensive plan. That policy jargon comes out of an essential idea that mental health is health care.

“The name Inseparable comes out of a two-fold idea,” Smith says. “One is that the health of our mind is inseparable from our body. Two is that if we come together and create a political force to create a movement for change, we’re inseparable.”

Smith grew up in Eufaula, Ala., in a BSC legacy family.

“My older brother Jack went to Birmingham-Southern and my father was a Methodist delegate to the board,” he says. His niece Sutton Smith is BSC’s 2020-21 Student Government Association president.

If BSC has awarded a few hundred degrees in political science in the last 30 years, dozens of those former poli-sci majors became lawyers and judges, or zigzagged into careers unrelated to politics or science. Smith did none of those things.

“I used to joke with Natalie Davis that I’m one of the few people with a political science major who actually does politics,” Smith says. “I went straight into campaigns and elections right after school.”

In addition to Bill Smith, Inseparable’s leadership includes co-founder Zak Williams, son of the late actor and comedian Robin Williams, who died by suicide in 2014, and a broad and diverse advisory board – medical practitioners, recovering addicts, people with personal or family experience of mental illness. “As we built out the board, it was intentionally a diverse group of people who are grounded not just in the science and policy, but also in the reality that everyday people face around mental health,” Smith says.

His first job was on a multimillion-dollar Alabama Supreme Court campaign that he described as “a baptism by fire into politics.” Campaigns are, inevitably, partisan, but as his career advanced, Smith discovered that the work that meant the most to him centered on policy.

“I figured out that I cared about issues a lot more than I cared about politicians,” he says. “Not that there aren’t some good politicians. I wouldn’t be working in the system if I didn’t believe there were. But it’s a lot more rewarding to work for causes than to work for candidates.”

Smith started out working for Republicans, became an independent, and then ultimately a Democrat. In 2004, he became the political director of the Gill Foundation, a funding organization that works to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

“I spent years and years taking the skills I’d learned from the campaign and election world and applying them to the fight for marriage equality,” he says.

The effort demanded a combination of philosophical commitment and practical action. Smith, who describes himself as “a social justice Methodist,” attributes a lot of his drive for such work to his time on the Hilltop.

“The idea of service to causes bigger than yourself – that was fairly well planted in me at Birmingham-Southern,” he says. “We put together the hearts-and-minds work that we needed to do to move the needle on marriage equality, but we also put together the political power that we needed to win a public policy battle.”

Mental health is his second front, but his background as a strategist accounts for only part of his purpose. Two years ago, Smith’s brother Abb Jackson “Jack” Smith II ’93 died by suicide.

“It was devastating for my entire family,” he says, “but the thing is, there are millions of families that are devastated by this.”

In his grief, he reflected on what it took to build a political movement.

“When we were starting Inseparable, what we saw and wanted to tap into is that we really need a mental health care system that allows us to all take better care of each other,” he says.

The hands-on tactics to create such a system expanded access through parity, integration, and workforce development. In other words, mental health care should be affordable, widely available in community and clinical settings, and provided by professionals who can reach under-served populations.

At the helm of Inseparable, Smith is continuing work that his brother started. Jack was a journalist and blogger who wrote hundreds of stories about depression and mental health.

“He was somebody who believed that you can make a difference in the world,” Smith says. “I’m confident that he would be very happy with me doing the work that I’m doing.”

This story was published in the Fall/Winter 2020 issue of ’Southern, BSC’s alumni magazine.

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