Walter Cronkite’s daughter visits La Crosse, talks mental health
3980110LA CROSSE, Wis. — One in five women will suffer from depression in her life time.
That statistic is one of the reasons author, journalist and public speaker Kathy Cronkite was in La Crosse Thursday.
Cronkite, daughter of famed television anchor Walter Cronkite, spoke at the Women’s Fund of Greater La Crosse’s annual fall luncheon at UW-La Crosse.
Cronkite suffers from clinical depression, and used her experience to author a book that has received wide-acclaim for its informative treatment of mental illness.
Her mission is to raise awareness about mental illness and erase the stigma.
“As my great mentor, John Rush, said ‘the brain is the organ of the mind,’ and you can’t separate them any more than you can separate the beat from the heart,” Cronkite says. “I think that we’re understanding that with cancer and diabetes, high blood pressure, cardio illness that there’s a stress and psychological component to those illnesses in the same way you can’t separate out mental illnesses because they are both brain and body components to those illnesses as well.”
