Detroit and the Civil War Detroit and the Civil War Detroit and the ...

Past president builds family center legacy
Dan Kelly couldn’t have
known how prescient his
words were that day years
ago while leisurely motoring across the
English countryside with his family.
“I was at the end of a long work
project in England and Rosemary and
three of our four kids came to visit,”
recalled Kelly, a Senior Club member
who served as DAC president in 1983.
“While on a Sunday drive we passed
a big estate with a manor house called
Rose Hill. I told the kids that one day
we’d have a place like that and name it
Rose Hill.”
More than two decades passed
before Dan and Rosemary Kelly
founded their own 372-acre Rose Hill
Center in Holly (MI) as bucolic and
lovely as its English namesake but with a
serious mission.
Inspired by their son, John, a passenger
in the car that fateful day, Rose Hill is a
residential treatment center for adults with
mental illness. Now in its 19th year of
operation, Rose Hill strives to help each
patient achieve his or her highest level of
independence.
Since opening its doors in May 1992,
Rose Hill has graduated over 1,000
individuals, who stay for up to one year
receiving comprehensive psychiatric
treatment and rehabilitation services,
before transitioning back to life in their
own communities.
“John became ill in 1986,” recalled
Kelly, who retired as vice chairman of the
international accounting firm Deloitte &
Touche in 1998. He was formerly
chairman of Touche Ross & Company.
22 DAC NEWS JULY 2011
Rosemary and Dan Kelly with son John in Rose Hill
Center’s greenhouse.
“He was in a local hospital for a couple of
months but they couldn’t diagnose him
and sort of gave up. My company had
New York offices and I inquired about east
coast hospitals.”
After visiting a couple of places, the
Kellys chose a hospital in Connecticut
where John, then 26, was diagnosed with
paranoid schizophrenia – a chronic
mental illness in which a person loses
touch with reality, often having delusions
and hearing voices that aren’t real.
“He was there almost two years. It got
to a point where he was doing better, but
he still needed treatment and
rehabilitation,” said Kelly, also the father
of daughters Mary Jo, Patricia and
Theresa.
Next the Kellys located one of just two
mental health rehabilitation centers in the
country in Massachusetts, where their son
spent nearly another two years.
“Within weeks we could see quite
an improvement in John,” said Kelly.
“But we were advised not to bring
him home because he’d become too
dependent even though he was
functioning well.”
No doubt the Kellys’ professional
backgrounds played a role in what
came next. He, a magna cum laude
graduate of Notre Dame, courted by
eight major accounting firms upon
graduation, she a Mercy College
graduate and one-time schoolteacher,
decided to be proactive.
“I got the idea, why not try to
replicate the rehabilitation center in
Massachusetts,” Kelly said. “We began
talking to the psychiatric community
in the Detroit area. They thought it was a
great idea but no money was offered.”
Added Rosemary, vice chairman of the
Rose Hill Board: “God used us as an
instrument. When John became ill
nothing like this was available here.”
Through business and social
connections, hard work and dedication,
the Kellys were able to raise enough funds
to buy a sprawling working farm in Holly
boasting Oakland County’s biggest barn
and make their dream come true not only
for John, but a larger community not
being served.
Studies say 26 percent of American
adults (or 57.7 million) experience mental
illness in any given year. Yet the onset of
John’s illness coincided with a shift from
publicly operated psychiatric institutions.
Michigan housed more than 20,000
patients in psychiatric hospitals in the
early 1960s but by 1975 less than 5,000.