Education

What is NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer Program

Peer-to-Peer is a unique, experiential learning program for people with any serious mental illness who are interested in establishing and maintaining their wellness and recovery.

The course was written by Kathryn Cohan McNulty, a person with a psychiatric disability who is also a former provider and manager in the mental health field and a longtime mutual support group member and facilitator.
An advisory board comprised of NAMI consumer members, in consultation with Joyce Burland, Ph.D., author of the successful NAMI Family-to-Family Education program, helped guide the curriculum’s development.
Since 2005, NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer Recovery Program has been supported by AstraZeneca.

What does the course include

Peer-to-Peer consists of ten two-hour units and is taught by a team of two trained “Mentors” and a volunteer support person who are personally experienced at living well with mental illness.
Mentors are trained in an intensive three day training session and are supplied with teaching manuals.
Participants come away from the course with a binder of hand-out materials, as well as many other tangible resources: an advance directive; a “relapse prevention plan” to help identify tell-tale feelings, thoughts, behavior, or events that may warn of impending relapse and to organize for intervention; mindfulness exercises to help focus and calm thinking; and survival skills for working with providers and the general public.

What is IOOV

In Our Own Voice (IOOV) is a unique public education program developed by NAMI, in which two trained consumer speakers share compelling personal stories about living with mental illness and achieving recovery.

The program was started with a grant from Eli Lily and Company.

IOOV is an opportunity for those who have struggled with mental illness to gain confidence and to share their individual experiences of recovery and transformation.

Throughout the IOOV presentation, audience members are encouraged to offer feedback and ask questions. Audience participation is an important aspect of IOOV because the more audience members become involved, the closer they come to understanding what it is like to live with a mental illness and stay in recovery.

IOOV presentations are given to consumer groups, students, law enforcement officials, educators, providers, faith community members, politicians, professionals, inmates, and interested civic groups.

All presentations are offered free of charge.

NAMI Connection Recovery Support Group

NAMI Connection is a weekly recovery support group for people living with mental illness in which people learn from each others’ experiences, share coping strategies, and offer each other encouragement and understanding.

What Is Hearts & Minds

The NAMI Hearts & Minds program is an online, interactive, educational initiative promoting the idea of wellness in both mind and body. Wellness is an ongoing process of learning how to make choices that support a more successful, healthy life.

Engaging in a wellness effort can make a huge difference in the quality of your life. One study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that taking the wellness approach can result in a 17 percent decline in total medical visits and a 35 percent decline in medical visits for minor illnesses.

Wellness is about the individual; you can decide what parts of your life you would like to change and you can determine your own success.

Parents & Teachers as Allies

In-Service Mental Health Education for School Professionals

NAMI is delighted to announce the expansion of our Parents and Teachers as Allies in-service mental health education program for school professionals. This two-hour in-service program focuses on helping school professionals and families within the school community better understand the early warning signs of mental illnesses in children and adolescents and how best to intervene so that youth with mental health treatment needs are linked with services. It also covers the lived experience of mental illnesses and how schools can best communicate with families about mental health related concerns.

This program responds to the recommendations included in Goal 4 of President Bush’s New Freedom Commission report on mental health that calls for schools to play a larger role in the early identification of mental health treatment needs in children and in linking them to appropriate services. Our program is based on NAMI’s highly successful Parents and Teachers as Allies (P&TA) publication.

The components of the in-service education program for school professionals include the following:

Welcome and Introductions – an education professional, who is also a family member, welcomes the school professionals and introduces the topics to be covered, often with a personal story.
Early Warning Signs of Mental Illnesses – a facilitator walks the school professionals through the early warning signs of mental illnesses, closely following the P&TA publication.
Family Response – a parent or caregiver of a child with mental illness covers the predictable stages of emotional reactions among family members dealing with the challenges of mental illness and the lived experience of raising a child with a mental illness.
Living with Mental Illness – a mental health consumer that experienced the early onset of mental illness shares a view from the inside, including a discussion about the positive and negative impact that their school experience had on their life.
Group Discussion
Closing Remarks and Evaluation

This program is designed for teachers, administrators, school health professionals, parents and others in the school community.

The program is designed to target schools in urban, suburban, rural, and culturally diverse communities. The toolkit has been developed to be culturally sensitive and a Spanish language version of the Parents & Teachers as Allies publication has been developed.

NAMI Provider Education Program

What is NAMI Provider Education

The NAMI Provider Education Program is a 5-week course that presents a penetrating, subjective view of family and consumer experiences with serious mental illness to line staff at public agencies who work directly with people experiencing severe and persistent mental illnesses.

The course helps providers realize the hardships that families and consumers face and appreciate the courage and persistence it takes to live with and recover from mental illness.

How is the Provider Education course unique

The Provider Course emphasizes the involvement of consumers and family members as faculty in provider-staff training. The teaching team consists of five people:

Two family members trained as Family-to-Family Education Program teachers;
Two consumers who are knowledgeable about their own mental illness, have a supportive relationship with their families, and are dedicated to the process of recovery; and
A mental health professional who is also a family member or consumer.

Few teaching programs employ consumers in this kind of sustained training effort in which they are paid to participate on a teaching team as they present a 5-week course.

The course reflects a new knowledge base -- the “lived experiences” of people coping with a mental illness or caring for someone who lives with a mental illness. Including this deeply personal perspective creates an appreciable difference in the program’s content. It adds a means of teaching the emotional aspects and practical consequences of these illnesses to the academic medical information in the course.


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