Coping With Your Loved One's Mental Illness: Help for You!
This lens highlights NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. If you are coping with a loved one's mental illness, there is help for you!
Did you know that one in four adults experience a mental health disorder in a given year? That means you probably know someone who is hurting and struggling, either personally or with a family member.
Coping by yourself takes a heavy toll emotionally, physically, and financially - and the effects of mental illness on an individual, a parent, a child, a family can be staggering. You do not need to struggle on your own, and in fact you are not alone! Think about it: it's socially "okay" to have a disease like diabetes or heart disease. But we are inclined to hide our loved one's mental illness with a sense of shame or maybe just out of denial...when instead, we really need to seek help.
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is a great resource to help you restore calm when your world is rocked.
- Family to Family classes
- Peer to Peer groups
- Vital information
- Local Chapters
- NAMI Advocate Magazine
- Community that knows what you are going through and can help!
- And much more!
What better time to make a decision to seek help and information? At the time of writing this lens it is Mental Illness Awareness Week/Oct 5-11, 2008.
Great Stuff on Amazon
Recommended Reading
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Because Kay Redfield Jamison is both a psychotherapist and sufferer of Bipolar Disorder, she shares unique, first-person insights on her struggles with this disease.
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 11/22/2008) 
Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder
This book will help you understand how the Borderline Personality Disorder affects your loved one and what you can do to stabilize your life.
Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 11/22/2008)
What is Mental Illness?
Is there Hope?
Visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) website. It offers many answers, and much hope. The link to NAMI's site: www.nami.orgHere are a few highlights:
- Mental illnesses are medical conditions that disrupt a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others, and daily functioning. Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life.
- Serious mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and borderline personality disorder. The good news about mental illness is that recovery is possible.
- Mental illnesses are biologically based brain disorders. They cannot be overcome through "will power" and are not related to a person's "character" or intelligence.
Please do check out the site, and consider signing up at a local chapter (the yearly association dues are low).
REMEMBER....
(Use your mouse to click and drag over gray area to reveal message!):
GREAT NEWS! YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE IN THE SHADOWS. NO MORE HIDING. RESOURCES ARE AVAILABLE FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY THROUGH NAMI!
Meeting of Minds
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