Honoring Dr. John Campo, Who Worked to Make Mental Health Part of Health

For more than three decades, Dr. John Campo has worked from a simple conviction: mental health is part of health. A pediatric psychiatrist and a longtime voice in suicide prevention, he has spent his career bringing mental health care into the medical settings where children and families already receive care.

In June 2026, Johns Hopkins Medicine published a profile of his career, "John Campo Changed Lives and Psychiatry," by Marc Shapiro. The profile shares that Dr. Campo recently stepped down as director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for medical reasons.

A career built on integrated care

Dr. Campo trained in pediatrics before psychiatry, and his work has focused on integrating mental health services into medical settings, caring for children and adolescents who live with both medical and psychiatric conditions, and preventing suicide.

Before coming to Johns Hopkins in 2020, he held leadership roles at the University of Pittsburgh, at The Ohio State University and Nationwide Children's Hospital, where he was chief of psychiatry, and at West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. At Johns Hopkins, he has served as the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor, director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vice chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, director of mental health for the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and vice president of psychiatric services at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

The profile describes a change in care that his field has worked toward: clinicians asking children directly about thoughts of harming themselves or wishing to be dead, and health systems designed to respond to their answers.

A mentor to the Center

Dr. Campo supported and mentored the clinicians and researchers who created the Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention, and he has served as a senior adviser to the Center. Many of the people carrying this work forward today learned from him.

"John's eye has always been on improving the standard of care for the most vulnerable of vulnerable youth seen in our healthcare system," says Dr. Holly Wilcox, the Center's director and founder.

A personal reflection

The same week, Dr. Campo shared something more personal. In an essay for The Washington Post, he writes about facing a life-threatening cancer and the role his faith has played in carrying him through. It is a reflection on the limits of medicine, and on what sustains people when they reach those limits.

We are grateful to Dr. Campo for his openness, and for a career spent helping young people and their families find care, and hope.