Mental Health Awareness Month coincides this year with one of the most damaging events on mental health this country has ever seen—the Coronavirus Pandemic. We’ve been sheltering in place in California for more than fifty days now, and the uncertainty ahead is heavy to carry and more than most can handle.
Since May is Mental Health Month, we have been featuring a mental health related article every week. To end this month, we interviewed Bob Carolla, Senior Writer, Communications & Public Affairs, at NAMI (The National Alliance on Mental Health) about what they are and what they do.
Jamie Tworkowksi is the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms--a non-profit dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and invest directly into treatment and recovery.
In 1949, Mental Health America named May as Mental Health Month. The purpose of the observance is to bring about awareness and spread the word that mental health is something everyone should care about. Awareness to other groups within that community has since grown with the first Thursday in May designated as National Children’s Mental Health Day.
I’m bipolar and I suffer from paranoia. They should be synonyms. It almost seems as if, if you’re bipolar, you’re automatically going to suffer from paranoia.
I know from experience; my level of paranoia runs the gamut. I have had episodes where I have thought that people were being sent to my house, that my house was bugged, that people or the feds were watching me, or that I was being followed. I got to the point where I wouldn’t drive.
For 34 years I was self-employed; working for a lunatic. I worked long, hard and successfully but used work as a way to “escape” my mental illness. Many years later I realized that work was my coping mechanism. Many people engage in drugs, sex, gambling, alcohol, cigarettes and other vices; my escape was work and sugar, my “drugs” of choice.
May is Mental Health Month so KRL will be posting a few mental health related articles this month. We are starting with an interview with the current board president of the Fresno affiliate of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illiness), Mary Lou Brauti-Minkler.
