The first thing she did when she made it big was to help her family, as many newly rich celebrities do. But her gesture has a poignant backstory. Haddish’s first big financial move was to get her mom out of a mental institution, she told GQ. When Haddish was 8, her mother was involved in a serious car accident. After spending three months in the hospital for treatment, she came out “an entirely different person” — abusive and volatile, Haddish said.
Now that Haddish has the means, she’s moved her mother and grandmother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, into an apartment, paying for nurses to care for her mom. She contracted a delivery service that sends them organic, fresh-made meals three times a day for $500 a week.
“I’m mostly taking care of my family right now,” Haddish said. “Literally all my money goes into my grandmother and my mother. I got a two-bedroom apartment and moved my sister in so she could be monitoring [our mom]. I got nurses for my mom. My grandma bumped her head and had to have her brain drained, and she’s dealing with Alzheimer’s.”
Haddish said she is now able to get her mother help from psychological experts she couldn’t afford to hire before. She was far from alone in that struggle. Less than 40% of the 45.6 million Americans who experience mental illness in a given year are actually able to get treatment, according to a report from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Some 50% of those who don’t get treatment say it is because they cannot afford it. Nationwide, individuals with mental illness spend an average of 10% of their annual income out-of-pocket for mental health treatment, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Mental disorders were one of the five most costly conditions in the United States in 2006, with expenditures at $57.5 billion.
Featured image: JStone / Shutterstock. NEW YORK – AUGUST 20, 2018: Tiffany Haddish attends the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall on August 20, 2018, in New York.
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