You’re invited to share your story, learn the facts, get help, be involved, and get in contact.

The Home page includes a number of videos, including features with Ron Howard, Glenn Close (and her sister, Jessie), Brigadier General Loree Sutton, and others.

Glenn and Jessie Close will talk about Bring Change 2 Mind on Good Morning America and The View (both ABC) and Dr. Nancy (MSNBC) today, Wednesday, October 21, 2009.

BringChange2Mind.org is a not-for-profit organization created by Glenn Close, the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF), Fountain House, and Garen and Shari Staglin of IMHRO (International Mental Health Research Organization).

The idea of a national anti-stigma campaign was born of a partnership between Glenn Close and Fountain House, where Glenn volunteered in order to learn about mental illness.

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Producers are looking for 18- to 25-year-olds living in the continental U.S. who have been diagnosed with a mental illness and are willing to share their personal experiences with a television audience.

MTV expects to start filming this fall and a camera crew would follow participants going about their daily life over the course of two to three months.

Participants should be comfortable sharing the ups and down of living with their illness, including the effect the illness has had on their relationships with family and friends, side effects from medications, therapy and other ways to manage their illness and challenges they take on in their academic and/or professional lives.

If you would like to be considered, please send your name, phone number, and a brief description of your experiences (250 words or less) to MTV via e-mail to <mentalillness@mtvn.com>.

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The APA Board of Trustees also voted to support the concept of a public plan option based upon the voluntary participation of physicians and other healthcare professionals in the ongoing dialogue of health care reform.

Download the announcement: APA_Endorses_HR3200_091809.pdf (37K)

APA Chief Executive Officer Norman B. Anderson, PhD, sent letters to Congress in June and July that noted, if passed, the health reform legislation would improve “access to affordable, quality health care for our nation, most notably for the 47 million individuals who are currently uninsured.”

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“Whether for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes or depression, health screenings provide a quick and easy way to spot the first signs of serious illness and can reach people who might not otherwise seek professional medical advice.

Clinical depression is a common medical illness affecting more than 19 million american adults each year. Like screenings for other illnesses, depression screenings should be a routine part of healthcare.”

Source: MentalHealthAmerica.net/go/depression-screening-day

Over 1,000 sites across the country are offering free, anonymous mental health screenings as part of this national awareness program.

To find a screening site: register.mentalhealthscreening.org/Locator1.aspx?MPEID=14

Anonymous online screening: MentalHealthScreening.org/screening/Welcome.aspx

Screening for Mental Health, Inc. (SMH) is the non-profit organization that first introduced the concept of large-scale mental health screenings with its flagship program National Depression Screening Day in 1991.

Another “free, confidential depression-screening test”: depression-screening.org

The depression-screening.org web site is sponsored by the Mental Health America as part of the Campaign for America’s Mental Health.

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Beginning this week and continuing throughout the month of October, many PBS television stations will broadcast MINDS ON THE EDGE: Facing Mental Illness.

MINDS ON THE EDGE is a multi-platform media project that explores severe mental illness in America.  The goal is to advance consensus about how to improve the kinds of support and treatment available for people with mental illness.

MINDS ON THE EDGE connects the dots between personal dilemmas facing individuals and families who are living with mental illness, medical practices that can be obstacles to treatment, and public policies that all too often fall short in providing support that could make a positive difference.

Web Site:  MindsOnTheEdge.org

TV Schedule: MindsOnTheEdge.org/listing/

Video Clips: MindsOnTheEdge.org/watch/

Take Part: MindsOnTheEdge.org/takepart/

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A teenage girl reflects on her emotional growth, remembering when feelings of love, jealousy, fear, and anger took control.  The narrator says she learns through experience that no matter how deep an emotion is, you don’t have to let it take you over.  She comes to realize that by bringing calm reasoning to emotional questions, your decisions will be what you really want them to be.

The film concludes, “she has begun to think about her emotions and she is on her way to emotional maturity.”

Her book, Emotional Wisdom: A Compassionate Guide to the Messages Hidden in Your Feelings, was published in April 2008.

Book Description: “It provides you with the essential skills to access the hidden messages in your feelings; for it is these messages that are at the heart of the healing process. Your emotions are the key to discovering your inner wisdom, or in other words, your authentic self. The numerous client examples throughout the book and the exercises at the end of each chapter will help you integrate on a sensory level, what you learn from the text.”

Emotional Wisdom draws on Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and the law of attraction, popularized in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret.

Based in Northern New Jersey, Harriet Haberman is a leader of Woman’s Empowerment Support Groups and practices Imago Relationship Skills for Couples and Singles.

Harriet Haberman:  harriethabermanphd.com

About the Book:  harriethabermanphd.com/aboutthebook.htm

See it at Amazon:  Emotional-Wisdom-Compassionate-Messages-Feelings

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Rev. Dr. Launa Virgo has written a two-part article at Examiner.com, “Does wealth equal happiness? How joy in life affects your health.”

In Part One, Virgo shares the results of a Gallup world poll conducted in 140 countries that found “wealth was not a determining factor” with respect to happiness. She also refers to the “Happy Planet Index” (HPI) published by the New Economics Foundation.

In Part Two, Virgo focuses on “how happiness impacts a healthy life.”  Here are some excerpts…

“True health is not the absence of disease, but a balance of life’s forces.”

Quoting Alexis Carrel, she writes what when envy, hate and fear are habitual, they “are capable of starting organic changes and genuine disease.”

Virgo writes, “Illness can be a way of adding interest to a bland, meaningless existence.”

“Challenges are ordinary and so is emotional pain.”

“Those who judge circumstances as good or bad find themselves always at the mercy of their own perception. Those who accept that life happens around and with a person, but not to a person, enables that individual to pass through challenges without being taken down by them.”

“The American consumer culture would lead you to believe that happiness is just a purchase away and all of life’s ills are solved with a pill.  As it turns out, Americans have become the world’s leading pill consumers.”

Concluding her list of  “some pathways to happiness,” Virgo writes, “Talking about things that are bothering you will help relieve stress.  Counselors and support groups offer non-judgmental help.”

See the web site for HappyPlanetIndex.org

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Georgia has nearly 100,000 children and adolescents with severe emotional disturbances and the agency created to care for them has served just 32 percent. What’s more, the Governor’s Commission on Mental Health concluded last year that too many are treated only after a crisis.

Now, a new pilot program treats people with mental illness while they have the support of a family, teachers, coaches and dance instructors. One person describing the program said, “They have been there 24/7 and for everything. I have never seen an agency that did all of that.”

Read about it here at Jacksonville.com.

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James Park, Chair of the Emotional Health Alliance: “The approaches we offer are designed to help children and young people free themselves from emotional confusion so that they can work out much better solutions that work for them.  That means offering children and young people the experience of a relationship that enables them to replace confusion with coherence, anger with containment, anxiety with calm, and fear with comfort.”

“We can insure that today’s emotional challenge does not become tomorrow’s problem because building relationships in which young people can work things out for themselves is a much better stimulus for their growth and maturity than telling them how to behave; because enabling young people to think, together with their teachers and with each other about how they want to learn and what they want to learn, will do much more for their attainment than driving them to higher exam results; and because shaping school environments in which staff, as well as students, feel capable, listened to, accepted, safe and included (CLASI) will enable everyone to achieve more and enrich alliance.”

Web Site:  www.ehalliance.org.uk

Emotional Health Alliance videos:  www.ehalliance.org.uk/media.html

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