Health Coalition Experience Assignment
I attended the meetings about mental illness and this coalition represents people who are recovering or have recovered from mental illness and they propose new consensus on mental health field:
- Recovery
- Self Determination
- Holistic Choices
- Voice
- Personhood
Purpose of these support groups isn’t for mental health treatment nor are they an alternative to therapy supplied with a licensed professional. The strength of these groups lies in their power to connect to each other because they have experiences that are similar. They encourage them to seek out certified mental health providers for treatment services.
This coalition represents the individuals and families and its purpose of this coalition is the promotion of wellness for individuals and families who are affected by the mental health issues and all people affected receive support they need to survive in the society.
Following events and programs are carried out in which coalition participate:
- Family Navigator and Mentor Program: In this program a navigator helps the individual to navigate the path which is best for them and their families and mentoring is used in this process for navigation of the path
- Kids Shop: This program was designed for school-aged kids & adolescents (6-17) who either live with a mental health issues or have a parent or sibling that lives having a mental health diagnosis. Kidshop is a chance for kids play games, share ideas, to discuss feelings and have fun while learning about how mental illness affects their family and them. Kids participating in the session(s) will receive a “tool” that offers them a method to speak about their feelings with their family.
- Creative Expression: This program is also known as Greater Toledo’s Artwork Support Groups, provides an enjoyable, non-threatening manner raise and for individuals living with mental problems to reconnect their relational ties to pals, family as well as other natural supports. This program provides some child, person and family support groups inside the city that can help players to make common ground.
- African-American leadership initiative: The African American Leadership Initiative is constantly working to enhance the lives of adults and kids with mental illnesses as well as their loved ones in a culturally sensitive way. The initiative want to step it up in obtaining the proper assistance and support to people in the African American community before first entry or during entry into browsing the mental health system. This program particularly desire to help those people displaced locally and aren’t involved in application or just about any mental health service and/ or network.
- Hispanic Leadership initiative: The Hispanic/Latino Leadership Initiative is constantly working to enhance the lives of adults and kids with mental illnesses as well as their loved ones in a culturally sensitive way. The initiative strives to link people in the Hispanic/Latino community and offer instruction and support to families and people. This program particularly desires to help those people that are in need of mental health services, applications or networks and displaced.
Other seminars and conferences are also organized for the awareness and solution of this problem and these all events are publicized through different means. Advertising is used to create awareness and tell people about such problems and what the organization is doing to cure these kinds of diseases. Newsletter is also a mode of communication and they personally invite individuals and organization related to this issue. These events have been proved successful because experts and people who experience the mental health problems both attend these meetings and awareness is created among people who are new to this health issue. Solutions are found out by opinions of the experts and experience sharing of the recovered and suffering people.
These groups have only one meeting in a week and four meetings a month. They gather for the discussion every Wednesday. The total attendance of the meetings which I attended was 22 and it is high attendace of people if we see the issue which means that these programs do increase the awareness among the people of the society. They charge no cost for the meeting.
This coalition is organized in the form of support groups, this institute’s connection recover support and parent support group etc. and for each type of meeting there is a chairperson who organizes and moderates the whole discussion session of the meeting. He moderates and ensures the effectiveness and decorum of the meeting.
The programs are discussed above in the report and these groups have similar experience related to mental health problems and these programs help people of different age groups, community, ethnicity, gender help get through their problems and help them to recover from the mental health issues. The group dynamics were very interesting for example mentoring, games, and sharing ideas, sharing feelings to help people get through the problems and these things also develop their interests in these programs. All these things help them conform to the group and people involved in these activities feel similarities between each other which somehow fulfill some the purposes of the programs and meetings.
Data is collected through the responses of the people involved in meetings and different program which then help experts to plan about the treatment of the patients of mental health problems and evaluate the conditions of the patients. I don’t have knowledge of any specific evaluation technique used for all this process.
I am definitely going to attend these meetings again and volunteer in these activities because they provide a lot of knowledge about the issue and by using this knowledge I can participate in different activities for helping people with mental health issues and I can also spread awareness about the issues. It can help me learn a lot of things and it would be great pleasure for me to volunteer in such activities