Category: NAMI
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Minority Mental Health Matters!
“Once my loved ones accepted the diagnosis, healing began for the entire family, but it took too long. It took years. Can’t we, as a nation, begin to speed up that process? We need a national campaign to destigmatize mental illness, especially one targeted toward African Americans…It’s not shameful to have a mental illness. Get…
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My Answers to Marya Hornbacher’s Questions
I love lazily copying and pasting content I’ve written elsewhere and repurposing it as a blog post. Once again, I post my answers to Marya Hornbacher‘s follow-up survey questions about whether I see mental illness as a physical disease: Do you consider mental illness a chronic physical disease? Please explain your response. It depends on the diagnosis.…
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Mental Health Parity
Download the What is Mental Health Parity? infographic pdf. Download NAMI’s report A Long Road Ahead: Achieving True Parity in Mental Health and Substance Use Care See more at: http://www.nami.org/parityreport.aspx#sthash.HFj93AOu.dpuf
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Death, Grief & the Beast
NAMI Orange County volunteer Melissa Nemeth passed on as did my brother-in-law Don. Grief that I denied myself now hits me. Now I realize how much compassion I withheld from my husband as I defended myself from pain and from being needed. My prayers go out to Melissa’s family and to my in-laws. The tears flow…
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Gardening & Praying
Lightly pruned our fig tree this morning, evening out its limbs. May not have been the best time of year to prune it, but some branches grew out of control, reaching into the neighbor’s yard and into the homeowners’ association’s hillside. Like me, the fig tree is productive, fecund, stretching itself outside the bounds of a…
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Two Losses in Three Parts #Writing101
As I thought about today’s writing prompt to write about a loss, I kept circling back to two losses – the loss of my maternal grandfather and the loss of my expectations and plans for my future. Now, a third pops into my mind – my husband’s loss of his brother. Somehow I will be…
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NAMI Provider Education – Week Three
Saturday I attended the third class of NAMI’s Provider Education. Here I summarize, paraphrase, and quote the handouts from the NAMI Provider Education Course Participant Manual 2013. In the third week course we learned about the cascade of secondary traumas which occur when a family is left to cope with mental illness alone. Kitt’s Note: Stage…
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GAO Report on Mental Health
Today I received the following email from NAMI on the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report on Mental Health. I feel somewhat guilty for simply copying and pasting emails I receive, but my purpose is to educate and advocate more than to write original material. New GAO Report on Mental Health Calls for Better Federal Coordination…
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The Benefits of Laughter
Thank you, Melissa Garzon, MD (medical school in Columbia – yes, she, like Sofía Vergara is a sexy, educated, and intelligent Columbian – how cool is that!), MPH (Master of Public Health from UC Berkeley – where I got my BA), for creating this great infographic. I just LOVE Melissa. She laughs at my jokes. Not…