2016

A story that involves NAMI's national Engagement Report and a view from the grassroots in Rosburg, Oregon. 

Engagement is defined as “winning and keeping trust, expressing that you care.”

Hollywood A-listers, TV, and movies are dealing frankly with issues once hidden. NAMI's National Director of Communications & Public Affairs Katrina Gays offers three reasons.

Do we like  to scare people with other medical treatments such as chemotherapy or dialysis? NAMI CEO Mary Giliberti explains why stigmatizing Halloween costumes and haunted asylum attractions are public health problems.

This storye--featured on page A3 of the Post and as the tabloid cover story for The Washington Express  distributed in Metro stations throughout the DC area--desribes  NAMI's Halloween Horrors campaign. It quotes NAMI CEO Mary Giliberti and several of NAMI's grassroots advocates.

Shootings, natural disasters and terrorist attacks affect first rresponders as surely as civilians. In the wake of the Dallas tragedy that left five police officers dead, the chief of police is responding tomental health concerns. NAMI's report on police mental health, released in April with the Department of Justice, is now being cited as a warning that  too few police agencies have prepared to support personnel who experience psychological fallout from mass casualty events.

NAMI and Alpha Kappa Alpha chapters natiowide are working together to increase mental health awareness in the African American community. African Americans comprise 12 percent of the population — the second-largest ethnic minority group in the United States — but they often receive disproportionately less and lower quality care than other communities for both medical and mental health services

NAMI called the bill a major step forward that also creates a framework for the future.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 422-2. Legislators are calling now for the Senate to act. The bill includes  provisions to address the nationwide shortage of psychiatric beds and child psychiatrists,as well as creating the position of assistant secretary for mental health in the Department of Health & Human Services.

The second in a series, "The Deaparate and the Dead"about the Massachusetts mental health care system, this article focuses on deadly confrontations with police. It is linked to an additional article,"Crisis in the Woods."

Almost 25 years after Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer. M.D., has published Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants to counter what he feels is a destructive level of ignorance and confusion about the  effectiveness of current medications. He makes the case that they work—not all the time, and not for all people, but in lots of ways that can save lives.