Nami El Dorado County is an Advocate for Mental Illness
Aug 29, 2016 09:39AM ● By David Norby
L to R: Cricket Hogate, Jan Melincoe and Maureen Focht
In 1979, the National Alliance on Mental Health began as a small, living room-based support
group for a few parents of adult children living with mental illness. It morphed into a nonprofit with hundreds of affiliate and state groups and is currently the largest advocate for mental health policy change in the U.S.
“NAMI helped put together a class named “NAMI Family-to-Family” that has been taught to over 350,000 people across the U.S. and a couple other countries,” says Jeanne Nelson, a leader for NAMI El Dorado County. “It’s designed for family members who have a loved one with mental illness, not the loved one themselves.”
Parents, siblings and spouses of loved ones living with depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, anxiety, PTSD and schizophrenia come in for six consecutive Saturday lessons. “It’s instruction-based, but we have tons of group exercises and interactions,” says Nelson. “We’re guiding people to really get inside the head of what it feels like to have a chronic mental illness so that there is significant empathy.”
Nelson and her husband teach the course in South Lake Tahoe once a year. In Placerville, the six-week course is offered semi-annually. Both locations also offer well-attended monthly support groups. Nelson remembers well the first time she attended a NAMI group in Palo Alto. It had been a long road to find support and care, both for herself and her son.
“He was on the honor role in high school,” she says of her son. “He had his own band. He was athletic and had a lot of friends,” but in his early twenties, he started to withdraw from his friends, was uncertain about choosing a major and became increasingly paranoid. “He went on to lose 30 pounds, and he was already this fit, trim kid, so it really showed. He thought his food was being poisoned.”
A difficult year would pass, with the misdiagnosis of psychosis, due to cannabis, causing his increasingly challenging paranoia to expand to near life-threatening consequences. It wasn’t until her son went into rehab that someone would discover the true issue. “Twenty hours into this Southern California rehabilitation place, we get a phone call that says, ‘You need to come pick him up. We think your son has schizophrenia,’” remembers Nelson. Eventually, her son received the care he needed. “He got into the number one NAMI-voted hospital for best care in California (El Camino Hospital in Mountain View); we were really lucky because that’s where his healing began.”
Discovering a NAMI support group, hearing other families’ stories and finding out how common these issues are inspired the Nelsons to get involved. Her husband now teaches Crisis Intervention Training (de-escalation techniques for dealing with someone currently experiencing a mental health crisis) to the CHP. They also offer educational outreach to nearby schools, colleges, churches and companies, man the warm hotline that receives a dozen calls a month from families in crisis, and take part in greater movements like bringing more types of psychiatric medications to pharmacies and insurance plans.
Nelson’s dream is greater compassion and more open communication. “Every single person on this planet has an obligation to learn about mental health to fight stigma,” she says.