Jim's Draft for NAMI

The following is a draft my brother Jim prepared for a local journal the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

I grew up outside of Boston in Belmont Ma. on Lawndale St  in a duplex , right next to Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church. My Uncle Matt bought the house in 1940 for his brother, sister and mother. My parents Jim and Clare,my older sister Marianne and my 2 younger brothers Ed and Matt lived  on the first floor . My paternal grandmother Catherine , my father’s sister Kathleen and her husband Bill lived on the second floor . From 1940 though the mid 40’s (war time) my mother’s sister Mary and her 3 children  Larry, Molly and Donny and my mothers mother Elizabeth who was ill and whose husband Ed had died suddenly after retiring, also stayed  with us on the first floor for extended periods of time.
I was raised, nurtured and embedded in a relationally dense and supportive home and a neighborhood with lots of human connections, struggles, adventures, and learning opportunities to experience.
My brothers and sister and I played with our friends on Lawndale street and were always aware that at any time there were other eyes in the neighborhood upon us and that concerns and delights about the children would be shared with the Lawndale street tribe. I was known and cared not only by my family but by my neighbors and Faith community.
Even today I can go up and down the street in my mind to each neighbor’s home and smile warmly in remembrance of their care and support.
Neighbors watched over and cared for the street, the tribe and the neighborhood.

Fall and winter are times for reflection and renewal of family ties, old and new friendships and the celebration our tribe and community.
This is a time where we set aside time to sit together at a common table to share food and memories, old and newly created rituals of family, faith and community that have evolved and sustained us over the course of a lifetime.

Today we are living in difficult, uncertain and troubling times. Our lives have become stressful on many fronts.There are ongoing wars and human suffering globally, severe economic, political, and societal pressures.
We are recovering from the Covid pandemic and adjusting to the rapid changes of a digital age, AI and its impacts.

We as a nation are lonelier more isolated less healthy and more disconnected.

We long to hear a live person to connect with on the phone that is not a canned message from a machine or AI. We want to hear another caring human that shares human experience and is not asking us to follow a preset series of commands in a loop that asks us to leave a message or hangs up.  

Being connected with other humans serves a deep, biological, inescapable human need . (Gopnik)

We become who we are in the contexts of relationships. We are at our core social. Relationships shape how we talk, walk, think, act, speak, behave and believe. They enliven our lives.
We now spend more time on screens than with one another at great risk to human connections and memories that nourish and are essential to living healthy mutually supportive lives.
(There are lots of statistics that in our culture we are more lonely and relationally starving. )

Life and living have always been a process of change and challenge.
We progress through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and elderhood and are constantly re-creating ourselves in the context of our family, tribe, community, work, belief systems, and culture.
Living in it’s nature is stressful, but there is good stress, eustress, that keeps us healthy and growing  and distress, stress outside our ability to cope with which inhibits our growth and limits us to focusing in fear for our survival.

When the flow of our lives is not moderate predictable and in our control, we lose our personal sense of safety and our brains move us  into states of fear, fight, flight or collapse.
The sense that we are in a safe caring and supportive relational environment is as essential to our health as food and water.

At NAMI Our Newsletter Group has got together to share our concerns about the human needs of Caring and Connection in providing healthcare and the growing depersonalization, monetization, and mechanization of the intrinsic value of relationships in health .
Medications and Interventional protocols certainly are important and necessary in healthcare  but Caring and Connection in the context of relationships are the glues that over time are essential throughout our lives to our health.

We (THE NEWSLETTER GROUP) have found two resources that have helped us anchor and structure our efforts
 
1) Two  books published by NAMI NATIONAL ,
      YOU ARE NOT ALONE  
       and
       YOU ARE NOT ALONE, for parents and caregivers.
The first of these books authored by Ken Duckworth MD .

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2) A third book HEALING by Tom Insel MD where he highlights the importance of the 3’Ps, PEOPLE PLACE AND PURPOSE as the essential soil for the delivery of mental health care.

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These resources have offered us an opportunity to review and reflect on the delivery,  effectiveness, and ineffectiveness of the ongoing of healthcare in our community.

All three emphasize the importance of our social bonds as integral in treatment.

They emphasize the importance of being able to share personal stories and struggles and to a sense of belonging in community and being seen and partnered in the process of healing and recovery.

We plan to work on bringing awareness to the work we and our partners in the community are doing to address the mental health and well-being of our community members.

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We have three goals in mind

To share personal stories of the realities, struggles, and successes of the lived experiences of people, families, and communities coping with mental health issues(challenges) and how best support one another.

To acknowledge the people, places and resources of community that provide the
encouragement and support for caring and connection.

To share resources that address, educate us about treatment of mental illness and the importance of human connection and caring in health.

Possible references

  •Insel
  •Duckworth
  •Perry
  •Ablon
  •Dunbar
  •Hrdy
  •Gopnick
  •Et al

  •YouTube
  •Articles
  •NAMI documents
  •Mine site news
  •Shared Stories