During the month of May, Mental Health Awareness Month gives us many opportunities to talk about mental health and its critical role in overall health. It’s through these open and honest conversations that the stigmas involved with mental illness are neutralized, and we make it easier for ourselves and others to ask for help.
Each year in May, since it founded Mental Health Month in 1949, Mental Health America (MHA) promotes mental health awareness throughout the country. MHA encourages everyone to rally friends and family members to raise funds for its public education programs using the many tools it offers on its website. They would like everyone to communicate that There’s no health without mental health, the message on many of their branded products available in their online store. As an advocate for mental health, I agree with this holistic view of health. It also resonates with me because one of Northeast Delta Dental’s most widely communicated and powerful messages is that there is no health without oral health.
Mental Health America is not the only national organization raising mental health awareness. I particularly appreciate the theme that the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) selected for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Month celebration, In Every Story, There’s Strength, encouraging people to share their mental health stories. NAMI gives directions for how to share stories through recorded and written formats and invites those who are willing to help others by sharing their mental health journeys to submit those stories to NAMI to be shared more widely. NAMI’s theme reminds us that sharing our stories can be compelling and impactful. Stories can help build connections and remind us of the many resources available to build and restore our mental health.
I’m most familiar with NAMI NH, as we are long-time supporters. This year on May 15 they are again sponsoring This Is My Brave – The Show at the Capitol Center for the Arts during which a cast of performers share their personal stories of overcoming mental illness, suicide and substance use disorder. The show aims to raise mental health awareness, dispel the discrimination surrounding mental illness and raise funds to help NAMI NH continue to provide free support, education and advocacy to over 50,000 individuals and families statewide.
We encourage the personal development and work/life balance of our employees in a variety of ways. In March, Justice John Broderick and Jeff Levin visited our campus to present a mental health workshop focusing on family life and raising happy, confident and well-adjusted children prepared to lead fulfilling lives. We also have an employee assistance program (EAP) that offers support for mental health and other concerns on a confidential, no-cost basis. Through our EAP, we’re offering a webinar by Dr. Katherine King entitled Overcoming Burnout: Pathways to Recovery and Self-Care during the month of May.
For further exploration on the topic of mental health, I recommend John Broderick’s, book, Backroads and Highways: My Journey to Discovery on Mental Health, if you haven’t read it already.
