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Empowerment in Numbers
There are many ways that a person with a mental illness can improve their level of functioning in the community, as well as improve their social skills. Group therapy is great because many times it goes hand in hand with what is known as peer support. The idea is to gather as many people as possible for these groups so that they may empower one another through sharing experiences. Peer support is special because it is something that can not be replicated through the professional training that a psychiatrist, therapist, or social worker may have. Results of peer to peer group therapy may include learning to develop relationships, to reduce one's level of social anxiety, and to feel comfortable in a safe place where they won't be judged.  A healthy environment is beneficial because often times we are influenced by others around us. Do you ever feel as if no one understands what you are going through? Many feel uncomfortable with disclosure but through interaction you may indeed strengthen your own recovery and someone else's.

 

 

 

Medication

Medication is the foundation for a successful recovery from mental illness. Taking your medication as prescribed and communicating with your doctor will help your mental health. Recovery from mental illness doesn't end with medication, but medication is the first step to regain all that was lost when despair seemed to dictate how you lived your life. The goal is to find the right medication for you and then build on this by working on your long term recovery from mental health issues.

 

 It takes time to find the right path in life. You can get your life back. There is no medication that will cure mental illness, but mental illness is highly treatable.

 

I will use my own recovery as evidence that finding the right medication is the cornerstone for progress. Before being put on my current regimine of medication, the doctors had tried almost every atypical antipsychotic that existed at that time.  Finding the right medication was the turning point in my life.What was once a world of frightening perceptions became a quality of life that is not perfect, but significantly better.

 

 

Certified Peer Specialists
 

There are more and more states across the country that have programs specialized in training people who have lived experience with mental illness to become certified peer specialists. When you combine all that is learned in a certification course with the ability to use one's own success with recovery as a method to help others, you have people who can make significant contributions to the system of mental illness services. Many peer specialists miraculously get through to a person who struggles with one of the first steps to getting better: acceptance.

 

Stigma

 

So much in our society today

You find people who just don't understand

Can we open up their eyes?

Can we lead them to realize?

That mental illness is stigmatized

 

How long will it be?

Before all the people

Who make all the decisions

Change all the mistakes that we have made

 

I don't believe in war

I don't believe in hate

I do believe in empathy

I do believe in recovery

 

We are all in need

Plant that seed and watch it grow

 

 

Mania
 

 “There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes.”

Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

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