Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Talking about mental illness:
 A guide for developing an awareness program for youth


Stigma continues to be a huge problem for people living with mental illness. It undermines a person's sense of self, relationships, well-being and prospects for recovery. Communities are proving they can make a difference through education and awareness programs. The program described in Talking about mental illness helps to increase awareness about mental illness and the stigma that surrounds it. It is based on the experiences of three communities that participated in the program, and the steps they took to increase awareness and understanding of mental illness.

Background to the program

The community sites used Beyond the Cuckoo's Nest, an awareness program for youth age 15 or older, as their starting point. The program was originally developed in 1988 by nurse case managers at the former Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (one of the founding partners of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). This program was developed in response to the community's expressed need for information on mental illness. It consists of a two-hour presentation designed to give secondary school students facts about mental illness and create opportunities for them to interact with people who have first-hand experience with mental illness.

People who have experienced mental illness, family members of people with mental illness, and health professionals deliver the program. The presenters who have lived with mental illness talk about their experiences -- what it was like when the symptoms of mental illness first developed, where they went for help and how they are currently managing. Students benefit from the unique learning experience the program offers, the opportunity to meet and talk to individuals who have been affected by mental illness. After attending the program, students often comment, "people with mental illness are just like everyone else."

The success of Beyond the Cuckoo's Nest and the desire to share the benefits of the program with people throughout Ontario led to the development of a second program in 1998. This program involved three partners: the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the Canadian Mental Health Association (Ontario Division) and the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario. Each partner shares the goals of increasing knowledge and understanding of mental illness, and eliminating stigma. Developing the partnership allowed the program to draw on the expertise and local networks of each organization.

The program goals were to develop and deliver awareness presentations in each of the three communities -- Hamilton, North Bay and Kingston -- and to document their experiences in order to develop resource materials to assist other communities across the province in delivering their own awareness programs. The learnings from the Beyond the Cuckoo's Nest program became the template to develop individualized community presentations.

Each community modified the program to reflect local realities and resources. This guide is the result of their experiences and their best advice on how to develop and carry out an awareness program for youth.

Talking about mental illness consists of two documents: the Community Guide and the Teacher's Resource.

Commmunity Guide

The Community Guide contains all of the information, support and tools that community members need to implement "Talking About Mental Illness" in their community -- an awareness program proven to be effective in bringing about positive change in young people's knowledge about mental illness, and in reducing stigma that surrounds mental illness.

The program brings together local community partners, including youth; people with mental illnesses and their family members; clinicians; teachers; and mental health and other agency representatives. Together, they develop and organize an educational awareness program hosted by local secondary schools.

The program provides secondary school students with the opportunity to hear the stories of community members who have experienced mental illness. The program also provides information about local mental health-related resources that provide support and help to youth coping with their own or a family member or friend's mental illness.

http://www.camh.net/education/Resources_teachers_schools/TAMI/index.html

Monday, June 21, 2010


Summer Solstice 2010: Why It's the First Day of Summer

                                            The Celebration of Summer Solstice, 2010 at Stonehenge
June 21, 2010

The first day of summer officially kicked off today at 7:28 a.m. ET, the beginning of the summer solstice and the longest day of the year—at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The summer solstice is a result of the Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the sun. The tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet. Today the North Pole is tipped closer to the sun than on any other day of 2010. The opposite holds true for the Southern Hemisphere, for which today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. As a result, at high noon on the first day of summer, the sun appears at its highest point in the sky—its most directly overhead position—in the Northern Hemisphere. That doesn't mean the sun will be exactly overhead at noon for everyone, said James Bell, an astronomer at Cornell University in New York State. It depends on the viewer's latitude—the sun is only shining down directly overhead at noon at the Tropic of Cancer. "It's still at a low angle if you're up in Alaska," Bell explained.No matter where you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the path of the sun across the sky—which rises in the lead-up to the first day of summer, then begins descending over the rest of the summer—seems not to change for the few days before and after the summer solstice.In reality, the sun's position is still changing, but at a slower rate.


Summer Solstice Wobbles Around the Calendar

While the June solstice generally occurs on the same day every year, the date does change every once in a while. For example, in 2008, the summer solstice occurred on June 20.This date shifting is a result of the discrepancy between a human calendar year—which is usually counted as 365 days—and an astronomical year, which is 365.25 days. Our leap year system—which adds an extra day to the calendar every four years—ensures our calendars are accurate, but it also causes the solstice date to flop around a bit."It's nothing astronomical changing. What's changing is the human side of it," Bell said.

Solstice Is Longest Day of the Year—Not Hottest

On the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere receives more sunlight than on any other day of the year, but that doesn't mean the first day of summer is also the hottest day of summer. Earth's oceans and atmosphere act like heat sinks, absorbing and reradiating the sun's rays over time. So even though the planet is absorbing lots of sunlight on the summer solstice, it takes several weeks to release it. As a result, the hottest days of summer usually occur in July or August. "If you think about turning up an oven—it takes it a long time to heat up," explained Robert Howell, an astronomer at the University of Wyoming. "And after you turn it off, it takes a while for it to cool down. It's the same with the Earth."

First Day of Summer Sparked Ancient Celebrations

The summer solstice is recognized and often celebrated in many cultures around the world, in both the past and present. The ancient Egyptians, for example, built the Great Pyramids so that the solstice sunset, when viewed from the Sphinx, sets precisely between two of the Pyramids. The Inca of South America celebrated the summer solstice with a ceremony called Inti Raymi, which included food offerings and sacrifices of animals and maybe even people. And perhaps most famously, Stonehenge in the United Kingdom has been associated with the winter and summer solstices for about 5,000 years. Observers in the center of the standing stones can watch the summer solstice sun rise over the Heel Stone, which stands just outside Stonehenge's stone circles. For many of the ancients, though, the summer solstice wasn't just an excuse to party or pray—it was essential to their well-being.

Associated with agriculture, the summer solstice was a reminder that a turning point in the growing season had been reached. "The calendar was very important—much more important than it is now," said Ricky Patterson, an astronomer at the University of Virginia. "People wanted to know what was going to happen so that they could be ready."


Ker Than,

for National Geographic News











Friday, June 18, 2010

Story of Father's Day

Father's Day is a beautiful festival that acknowledges and appreciates the important role played by a father in raising the child and consequently building a stronger society. Though fathers have been revered at all times by civilizations across the globe ironically what was missing until the last century was the official recognition of the significance of fathers in ones life. Father's Day story is the tale of realization of the need for a Father's Day festival primarily by Ms Sonora Louise Smart Dodd of Washington. The story narrates Sonora's unflagging struggle to officially set a day to honor all fathers. Thanks to Sonora, today Fathers Day is celebrated in a large number of countries around the world.


The Beginning of Father's Day Story
Historians have recorded that there was a tradition to celebrate Father's Day even thousands of years ago. Their study say that 4,000 years ago in Babylon a son called Elmesu carved a father's day message on a clay card. In his message Elmesu wished his father a long and healthy life. There is no knowledge as to what happened to this father son duo but it is believed that several countries retained the custom of celebrating Father's Day.


Genesis of Father's Day in Modern Society
The tradition of celebrating Father's Day as seen today originated in the last century. Though there are several people who are credited for furthering the cause of Father's Day, there is far greater acceptance for Ms Sonora Louise Smart Dodd's contribution. A doting daughter from Spokane, Washington, Ms Dodd is recognized as the Founder or Mother of the Father's Day Festival.


Inception of the Father's Day took place in Sonora's mind when she happened to hear a Mother's Day sermon in 1909. Sonora, who was 27 then, had begun to recognize the hardships her father must have gone through while bringing up his six children alone. When Sonora was 16, her mother had died during childbirth. Sonora's father a Civil War veteran by the name of William Jackson Smart raised six children including the newborn on his own. Sonora questioned that if there is a day to recognize mothers then why is not there a day to honor fathers?

Many people laughed and joked at Sonora's idea. But her will did not droop. She began a sincere campaign lobbying for the cause of Father's Day. Her hard work began to show signs of success when Spokane celebrated its first Father's Day on June 19, 1910 with the support of Spokane Ministerial Association and the local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). To pay tribute to her affectionate father, Sonora wished that Father's Day be celebrated on her father's birthday on June 5, but it so happened that there was not enough time for preparation and the day came to be celebrated on third Sunday in the month of June.

The noble idea of celebrating Father's Day became quite popular in US so much so that President Woodrow Wilson approved of the festival in 1916. President Calvin Coolidge too supported the idea but it was President Lyndon Johnson who signed a Presidential Proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day in 1966. Then in 1972, President Richard Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day to be held on the third Sunday of June.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

A Powerful Quote from the Book
 Surviving Schizophrenia

"I told her the long story about the hospital; how in the beginning it was difficult to get distance from people suffering illnesses that stole their minds for a while or a lifetime, how poignant and painful it was to see them struggle inside schizophrenia...You wonder how it is that they can still work so hard at keeping their spirit, hold on to hopes, try to savage dignity from ruins of lives. Try to even hold on to love...And then there's a day you look around the ward and suddenly understand that it's in here that you've found your heroes."
                                                                                                

-Seth Norman, "Saving Grace," 1994
Submitted by a Nipissing Family Member June, 2010

Monday, June 7, 2010

Understanding Family Relationship Problems
by: Steve Pavlina


One of the most difficult matters to confront with respect to family relationships is that you don’t control the entire relationship yourself. Whether the relationship thrives or withers isn’t up to you alone. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango.


When major family relationship problems are encountered, it’s common to attempt a control strategy. You try to get the other person to change. Sometimes this approach works, especially if your request and the other person are both reasonable. But many times it just leads to frustration.



On the other hand, if you can’t change the other person, maybe you should just accept them as they are. That’s another strategy that sometimes works, but this one can also lead to frustration and even resentment if your needs aren’t being met.

There is, however, a third alternative for those times when changing the other person and accepting the other person as-is are both unworkable for you. And that option is to change yourself in a way that solves the problem. This requires that you redefine the problem as an internal one instead of an external one, and then the solution will take the form of an expansion of your awareness and/or a change in your beliefs.

An internal way of viewing relationship problems is that they reflect back to you a part of yourself that you dislike. If you have a negative external relationship situation, it’s a reflection of a conflict in your own thinking. As long as you keep looking outside yourself for the answer, you may never resolve the external problem. But once you start looking inside yourself for the problem, it may become easier to solve.

What you’ll find when you tackle such problems is that you harbor one or more beliefs that perpetuate the relationship problem in its current form. Those beliefs are the real problem — the true cause of the unhealthy relationship.

For example, consider a problematic relationship between yourself and another family member. Suppose you hold the belief that you must be close to every family member simply because they’re related to you. Perhaps you’d never tolerate this person’s behavior if it came from a stranger, but if the person is a relative, then you tolerate it out of a sense of duty, obligation, or your personal concept of family. To push a family member out of your life might cause you to feel guilty, or it could lead to a backlash from other family members. But genuinely ask yourself, “Would I tolerate this behavior from a total stranger? Why do I tolerate it from a family member then?” Exactly why have you chosen to continue the relationship instead of simply kicking the person out of your life? What are the beliefs that perpetuate the problematic relationship? And are those beliefs really true for you?

I love my parents and siblings unconditionally (I have two younger sisters and one younger brother). However, I haven’t had a particularly close-knit relationship with any of them for many years. There was no major falling out or anything like that — it’s just that my personal values and lifestyle have moved so far from theirs that there isn’t enough basic compatibility to form a strong common bond anymore. My parents and siblings are all of the employee mindset with a very low tolerance for risk, but as an entrepreneur, risk is my favorite breakfast. My wife and kids and I are all vegan, while my parents and siblings celebrate the holidays with the traditional consumption of animals. I don’t recall anyone in my family ever saying, “I love you,” while I grew up, but with my own kids I’m very affectionate and strive to tell them I love them every day. My parents and siblings are all practicing Catholics, but I left that behind 17 years ago in order to explore other belief systems. (Technically within their belief system, I’m doomed to hell, so that sorta puts a damper on things.) Even though this is the family I grew up with and shared many memories, our core values are so different now that it just doesn’t feel like a meaningful family relationship anymore.

Despite all these differences, we’re all on good terms with each other and get along fairly well, but our differences create such a big gap that we have to settle for being relatives without being close friends.

If you operate under the belief that family is forever and that you must remain loyal to all your relatives and spend lots of time with them, I want you to know that those beliefs are your choice, and you’re free to embrace them or release them. If you’re fortunate enough to have a close family that is genuinely supportive of the person you’re becoming, that’s wonderful, and in that situation, you’ll likely find the closeness of your family to be a tremendous source of strength. Then your loyalty to family closeness will likely be very empowering.

On the other hand, if you find yourself with family relationships that are incompatible with your becoming your highest and best self, then excessive loyalty to your family is likely to be extremely disempowering. You’ll only be holding yourself back from growing, from achieving your own happiness and fulfillment, and from potentially doing a lot of good for others. If I retained a very close relationship with my birth family, it would be like putting a lampshade over my spirit. I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

My way of dealing with my family situation was to broaden my definition of family. On one level I feel an unconditional connection with all human beings, but on another level, I see people with whom I share a deep compatibility as my true family. For example, my wife and I both have a strong commitment to doing good for the planet as best we can, which is one reason we each find each other attractive. And that’s partly why she’s my best friend as well as my wife. When I see people who are living very, very consciously and deliberately and who’ve dedicated their lives to the pursuit of a worthy purpose, I have a strong sense that on some level, those people are members of my family. And this connection feels more real to me than the blood relationships I was born into.

Loyalty is a worthy value, but what does it mean to be loyal to one’s family? Since loyalty is very important to me, I had to refine my view of this concept to place loyalty to my highest and best self above loyalty to the people I was born with. That was a difficult mental shift to make, but in the long run it has given me a sense of peace. I realize now that family is a concept which is capable of extending far beyond blood.

What I’m suggesting is that in order to solve family relationship problems, which exist at one level of awareness, you may need to pop your consciousness up a level and take a deeper look at your values, beliefs, and your definitions of terms like loyalty and family. Once you resolve those issues at the higher level, the low level relationship problems will tend to take care of themselves. Either you’ll transcend the problems and find a new way to continue your relationship without conflict, or you’ll accept that you’ve outgrown the relationship in its current form and give yourself permission to move on to a new definition of family.

You see… when you say goodbye to a problematic relationship issue, you’re really saying goodbye to an old part of yourself that you’ve outgrown. As I became less compatible with my birth family, I also gradually dropped parts of myself that no longer served me. I drifted away from rigid religious dogma, from fear of risk-taking, from eating animals, from negativity, and from being unable to say, “I love you.” As I let all of those things pass from my consciousness, my external-world relationships changed to reflect my new internal relationships.

As within, so without. If you hold onto conflict-ridden relationships in your life, the real cause is your inner attachment to conflict-ridden thoughts. When you alter the mental relationships within your own mind, your physical world will change to reflect it. So if you kick negative thoughts out of your head, you will find yourself simultaneously kicking negative people out of your life.

There is a wonderful rainbow at the end of this process of letting go, however. And that is that when you resolve conflicts in your consciousness that cause certain relationships to weaken, you simultaneously attract new relationships that resonate with your expanded level of consciousness.

We attract into our lives more of what we already are. If you don’t like the social situation you find yourself in, stop broadcasting the thoughts that attract it. Identify the nature of the external conflicts you experience, and then translate them into their internal equivalents. For example, if a family member is too controlling of you, translate that problem into your own internal version: You feel your life is too much out of your control. When you identify the problem as external, your attempted solutions may take the form of trying to control other people, and you’ll meet with strong resistance. But when you identify the problem as internal, it’s much easier to solve. If another person exhibits controlling behavior towards you, you may be unable to change that person. However, if you feel you need more control in your life, then you can actually do something about it directly without needing to control others.

I’ll actually go so far as to say that the purpose of human relationships may be the expansion of consciousness itself. Through the process of identifying and resolving relationship problems, we’re forced to deal with our internal incongruencies. And as we become more conscious on the inside, our relationships expand towards greater consciousness on the outside.

Understanding Family Relationship Problems.htm

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Good Day!

For those of you who were not able to attend our last Family Peer Support meeting on the 1st, I'd like you to know that we have done some brain storming around summer activities for Nipissing Family. Those who attended completed a satisfaction survey on their overall experience at Nipissing Family. This will aid us in working over the summer to get you the things you want this fall. There seemed to be a general consensus of wanting to hear more guest speakers and educational films around mental health issues.

 Joel and I would like to thank those of you who have already completed the survey. We very much appreciate your feedback. We would also like to encourage those of you who have not completed one to do so. They are available through the office or I can e-mail you one.

In other news, we have decided that a change of location for our summer monthly meetings would be great way to keep things fun. This way we can enjoy the great outdoors together! A couple of our family members have generously offered their homes and gardens for us to meet. We also agreed that meeting at 5:00 for a pot-luck style dinner would be a nice way to share with one another. Please contact me for location details as well as food ideas for our next meeting.

Also discussed was our Monday walking group. With the groups support we have decided to put it on hold until the fall and can start it back up again in September sometime. If you have any ideas on what you would like to see at Nipissing Family this fall please don't hesitate to call. I'd love to hear from you!

**Don't forget to help in getting the word out for our upcoming NAMI Family-to-Family course this September.

Have a lovely weekend!

~ April
Family Peer Support Specialist
Nipissing Family