Nami family-to-family education program participant manual free download

This course is free and is open to family members and friends of adults with mental illness. A tribute video containing moving testimonials about the NAMI Family-to-Family program from family members and course instructors. Family-to-Family teachers are volunteer, illness-experienced family members who have been trained and certified by NAMI NH to teach the course.

Get Involved Awareness Events. Get Involved Share Your Story. Get Involved Partner with Us. Advocacy Advocate for Change. Advocacy Policy Priorities. Advocacy Policy Platform. Advocacy Crisis Intervention. Advocacy State Fact Sheets. Advocacy Public Policy Reports. This course was very thorough and answered so many questions for me. It helped me to realize that others have the same issues and therefore understand.

View All Events. Vermont's resource for education, support and advocacy since Membership Contact Us. Trained family members teach the course. We call these basic illness concepts and we will be discussing two of them in class tonight. The first concept concerns how to view the illness experience. Therefore, the course will cast a wide lens, exploring the biological, psychological, and environmental dimensions of brain disorders.

Direct class to Class Handout 3. Orient the group to the three columns, reading only the top line of titles down the page. Covering all these topics means that this course will offer a tremendous wealth of factual information. We will provide a feast of facts, and you will take from it the food for thought you need most. We trust absolutely that you will know best what is important for you. Notice one other thing: The majority of classes in the course relate to topics in the middle column—to the subjective feelings of family members and to the lived experience of those who suffer from mental illness.

This emphasis on emotional understanding and insight of our relatives and of ourselves is a theme we will return to again and again.

And, for our last class, we will have a class party to celebrate the experience we have shared together. It imposes an overwhelming burden of stress and anxiety upon our lives. Because we are dealing with trauma, we need to learn about the impact these devastating mental disorders have on our emotions. The principle of recognizing and caring about our feelings comes from a model of family education called Supportive Family Training, developed by family member professional Sheila LeGacy.

We know we have many reactions to mental illness when it strikes someone we love. We rarely get a chance to talk about these feelings with people in the system.

But with other family members we can talk about our reactions. We can disclose how we feel, how the stress of care and chronic worry affects our lives. From thousands of conversations between family members in support groups, we know we experience intensely painful feelings and reactions to mental illness Ask participants to suggest some feelings they have experienced.

Write feelings down on pad as people suggest them. Use list below for coaching. What separates us from a lot of traditional thinking in the mental health field is this: we believe these reactions are perfectly normal responses, given the catastrophes we are trying to adjust to.

Just look at all the traumatic emotions up on the board! We believe that we have a right to our feelings, and that we need to understand and express them.

Position Chart 1: Stages of Emotional Response so everyone can see it. You all recognize that mental illness has had an enormous impact on your lives. What you may not know is that you tend to respond to this trauma in characteristic and predictable ways.

Many family members. It is such an important aspect of our course that we will go over it now in some detail. Direct class to handout 4: Predictable Stages so group can follow lecture. Read the titles and descriptions of the nine stages of emotional response from the handout. Return to the lecture below to read the points. There are some important points to emphasize here: 1. None of these stages are wrong or bad.

They are normal reactions everyone experiences when struggling to cope with serious illness and trying to deal with critical disruptions in their lives. This process is ongoing—for most of us it has taken years. The process is also cyclical; we will start it all over again every time our relative has a relapse, or suffers a serious setback. Different family members are often at different places in the cycle, which is why we sometimes have difficulty communicating with each other and agreeing on what to do.

This developmental account is not about expectations. This is a human process that you do your way. If you know where you are in it you can be gentler with yourself.

We think it offers hope to see that we progress through pain and grief to acceptance. As you get to know each other better in this class, you will begin to recognize these stages and emotional reactions. In this way, old timers help newcomers; we inform each other and we validate our feelings.

It is vitally important for family members to learn about these emotional responses because where we are directs us to what we need in any given stage of the cycle.

For example, look at what we need when going through the hard times of dealing with catastrophe. Read needs, pointing at chart, stage 1.

By stage 2, we are full of emotion and have a different set of needs. We need to sound off, learn to cope, learn all about the illness. Read stage 2 needs And by stage 3, we are getting it together. We need to restore the balance in our lives; we find purpose in advocacy and action; we help others.

As you go through the NAMI Family-to-Family Education Course you will find the course material specifically relates to these various levels of family needs. That is why feelings are at the center of all that we do, and why learning about feelings is a cornerstone of the course.

At the end of your visit together, we will ask each of you to introduce your partner to the whole group. Read topic list chart.

This exercise is not a memory test. If you want to, take notes about your partner on your card. Also, if you forget anything in your introduction, your partner can prompt you.