California mental-health official · earliest documented use of the illness/wellness wordplay, March 1984
Charles Roppel headed the Mental Health Promotion Branch of the California Department of Mental Health, and in March 1984 he toured Louisiana giving talks on friendship, relationships and “wellness” that were written up in at least three newspapers — in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Rayville. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the earliest known form of the illness/wellness letter-swap to those speeches and concludes he may have coined it. The historians Maytha Alhassen and Zaheer Ali, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books ↗, likewise say the idea was “fully fleshed out in a 1984 speech by Charles Roppel,” who was citing a 1982 campaign promoting friendship as good medicine. Beyond that job title and that week of speeches, the documentary record on him is thin — which is part of why a punchier name got attached to his line.