There will be plenty written about her extraordinary life: the songs, the rhinestones, the movies, Dollywood, the business empire, the awards, and a career that somehow seemed to belong to several generations at once.
At North Boulder Counseling, though, we find ourselves thinking about something else.
Dolly Parton embodied dignity and a ferocious kindness.
She was unapologetically herself without insisting that everyone else be like her. She was famous for joy while being remarkably honest about pain. She accumulated extraordinary wealth and influence and repeatedly found practical ways to use both to make other people’s lives better.
Perhaps most remarkably, Dolly managed to become beloved by groups of Americans who sometimes struggle to hear each other.
She was a deeply Southern woman whose identity was rooted in the Smoky Mountains and her Christian faith. She was also a longtime supporter of LGBTQ+ people and became an icon within the gay community. Dolly belonged in the Smoky Mountains and in drag shows equally.
The Guardian once devoted an article to this unusual ability, describing her as a star who could unite not only rock and country, but the political left and right. The Washington Post similarly examined the unusual breadth of her appeal and her ability to take meaningful stands without making herself the property of any political movement.
Dolly wasn’t neutral about human dignity. She was disinterested in deciding who belonged on which side. She refused to participate in dehumanizing people for their beliefs. In a country finding reasons to separate from one another, that feels worth paying attention to. She often suggested that it’s our job to find out what we have in common with one another.
So today, as we remember Dolly Parton, here are three things we think she taught us about mental health, being a good human, and living a life of generativity.
1. Know Who You Are. Let Other People Be Who They Are.
One of the most psychologically interesting things about Dolly Parton was that she seemed remarkably comfortable with apparent contradictions.
She was traditional and unconventional.
Religious and deeply accepting. Deeply rooted in one place and embraced around the world. A savvy businesswoman who built an enormous commercial empire and a woman who gave millions of dollars away. She didn’t appear particularly interested in resolving those contradictions for other people’s comfort.
She knew who she was and maybe that helped her allow other people to know who they were, too. When The Guardian asked Dolly about her unusually strong LGBTQ+ following, she connected it directly to her own experience of being different. She explained that she had spent her own life fighting for the right to be herself and therefore appreciated other people for who they were. Her conclusion was characteristically simple: “We are who we are.”
She wasn’t interested in preaching. She said she wanted to do her work, make her music, love people and share what she had. That philosophy was not merely convenient celebrity branding. She did just that.
Dolly publicly supported LGBTQ+ rights even while maintaining an enormous following in more socially conservative parts of America. She also spoke publicly in support of Black Americans demanding to be seen and heard during the racial-justice protests of 2020. The Washington Post noted something important about her broad appeal: wanting to belong to everyone did not mean Dolly stood for nothing. She stood for love and she was unwilling to decide that it could ever belong to any one side.
There is an important mental-health lesson in that distinction. Acceptance does not require the absence of conviction. We can know what we believe without needing every person around us to believe exactly the same thing. We can disagree without dehumanizing. We can have boundaries without contempt. We can decide that an aspect of someone’s identity doesn’t tell us everything worth knowing about that person.
Psychologically, there is real strength in being able to say:
This is who I am. That is who you are. And neither of us has to disappear for us to recognize one another’s humanity.
Dolly seemed unusually good at this. At a time when outrage can be rewarded with attention and algorithms can continually show us evidence that the another side is terrible, perhaps Dolly’s example asks something harder of us:
Can we stand for something without ‘otherizing’ folks who disagree?
Can we remain curious?
Can we look for what we have in common even when we see what looks different?
Can we allow another human being to be more complicated than the category they may be assigned?
This takes an incredibly strong sense of self not to be threatened by differences.
2. Mental Health requires honesty and resilience.
This may be one of the most important things to remember about a woman who seemed to radiate joy. Dolly Parton was not happy all the time and she didn’t pretend she was. In interviews, she described herself as deeply sensitive, someone who felt things intensely and experienced sadness and melancholy like anyone else.
She also spoke publicly about a much darker period of her life. During an interview for the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Dolly described a period in the early 1980s when health problems, family difficulties, stress, heartbreak and physical changes converged. She said she became emotionally “broken down.” When asked about suicide, Dolly acknowledged that during that period she came to understand how someone could reach that point. She described having serious conversations with God while struggling through it.
AARP later included Dolly among public figures who had spoken candidly about depression, highlighting the contrast between her famously buoyant public personality and the emotional pain she had experienced privately. We often misunderstand mental health as feeling good. It isn’t. A psychologically healthy life still includes the uncomfortable emotions too; grief, anxiety, anger, loneliness, heartbreak and confusion. Periods when we don’t recognize ourselves. Times when our usual coping strategies aren’t enough. Sometimes periods when we need someone else to help us find our footing.
Mental health isn’t the elimination of discomfort. It is developing the capacity to experience them without believing that the difficult moment is the entirety of our life or proof of your failing. Dolly’s optimism seems more meaningful when we understand that it wasn’t naïveté. She knew darkness. Her joy existed alongside it. That is very different from toxic positivity. Real resilience makes room for dualities.
- You can be grateful and grieving.
- Successful and struggling.
- Confident and uncertain.
- Strong and exhausted.
- Hopeful and scared.
- Sometimes on the very same day.
Dolly experienced another enormous loss when Carl Dean, her husband of nearly 60 years, died in 2025. She spoke publicly afterward about grief and the enormous adjustment of continuing life without someone who had been beside her for six decades. Sometimes strength is hunting like hell and staying with ourselves long enough for the next chapter to become visible.
3. Give What You Have
Dolly Parton’s philanthropy could fill an article by itself. What is most striking to us isn’t simply how much she gave. It’s how practical her giving was. Dolly grew up in poverty in rural Tennessee. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was unable to read or write. She adored him and described him as highly intelligent, while also wondering what opportunities literacy might have opened for him. So in 1995, she started Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in her home county.
The idea was beautifully straightforward: give young children books. Not occasionally. Put high-quality books directly into children’s homes, addressed to the child, month after month, at no cost to the family. The program grew far beyond Tennessee. In 2023, the Imagination Library celebrated the extraordinary milestone of 200 million books gifted to children across the country, and the organization reported distributing more than two million books each month to children around the world.
When devastating wildfires hit East Tennessee in 2016, Dolly helped establish the My People Fund, which ultimately raised millions of dollars and provided direct assistance to families who had lost their homes. Then came COVID-19. In March 2020, Dolly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research. Vanderbilt later confirmed that the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund supported important early work associated with Moderna’s vaccine research. One Vanderbilt researcher described her funding as supporting a critical early stage of the work used to demonstrate an immune response. Dolly had a financial resources and found the people who had the scientific resources and there she invested in her values.
Yes, all of these huge financial contributions are to be revered. The gift that she gave that we all can give and that is arguably as worthwhile as any of the financial donations, is loving people. Not looking for who is right or who earned it, just loving because loving is the right thing. We sometimes imagine generosity as something we’ll practice when we have more. When we have more money, time, influence, or more energy. But Dolly’s true generosity existed well before she had millions to give away. It was her character and her value to love. We all have love and it never runs out.
Human beings need meaning, purpose and connection. These are the foundation to all mental health. Foundational. We need experiences that remind us that our lives extend beyond our own worries and accomplishments. Dolly understood that.
Generosity done well nourishes both people.
Maybe the Real Lesson Was Love
There is a temptation when someone beloved dies to turn them into a saint. Dolly Parton was a human being, not one. She was complicated, as all of us are. But across decades of interviews, music, business and philanthropy, a remarkably consistent philosophy emerged:
- Know who you are.
- Let other people be who they are.
- Don’t confuse pain with failure.
- Help when you can.
- And love people.
Perhaps that is part of why her death feels bigger than the loss of an entertainer. Dolly seemed to occupy a shrinking piece of American common ground. The Guardian observed that her admirers could include both conservative heartland America and LGBTQ+ communities. The Washington Post wrote about the unusual universality of her appeal.
It may have happened because she consistently placed human beings before categories. There is something profound in that. People need belonging, to be seen as more than our worst moment. We need relationships in which disagreement doesn’t automatically mean rejection. We need to know that sadness doesn’t make us defective and struggle doesn’t minimize everything about us. Maybe living well isn’t nearly as complicated as we sometimes make it.
Love people.
Be yourself.
Let other people be themselves.
Millions of people who may agree on very little, are all grieving the same woman. There is something beautiful about that. Perhaps one final lesson from Dolly in it:
We have more in common than we think.
Thank you, Dolly.
