Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

An Expectation of Recovery

The North Carolina Sun Journal ran a great article on April 24, profiling a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia 30 years ago (at the age of 24). Sandy Goble, now married and with a nursing career, remembers what it was like to first recieve the news that she had schizophrenia. It seemed like "the end of a lot of hopes and plans."

Even after dealing with the long, hard process of finding the correct diagnosis (Goble was re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but the official diagnosis was never clear) and a treatment plan that worked for her, Goble and the authors of the article still points out that she and many other people with mental illness consider themselves recovered.

The article continues on to debunk 5 common myths about mental illness - see the original source to review them.

The most interesting thing about this article is that it was written as part of a government-initiated project (sponsored by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration - SAMHSA) known as the Elimination of Barriers Initiative (EBI). Begun in September of 2003, EBI is being piloted in eight U.S. states, and aims "to counter stigma and discrimination, reduce barriers to treatment, build public support around the idea of recovery, and emphasize the importance of having quality, community-based services accessible to people with mental illnesses." (from the SAMSHA EBI website - http://www.allmentalhealth.samhsa.gov/). The roles of the pilot states, over the next three years, will be to develop relationships with organizations on the state and local level - community treatment centers, public education organizations, public speakers for anti-stigma campaigns, etc. Through these relationships, they aim to "assist in the development of strategic marketing plans [for the distribution of mental health education and resource information] to be used at the State level." Presumably, if the pilot states are successful, such strategic marketing plans can then be adapted for other states, and perhaps even other countries as well.

The EBI website (http://www.allmentalhealth.samhsa.gov/) has some good resource pages, including myths about mental illness, personal stories from mental health consumers, and downloadable tools to create mental-health friendly schools and workplaces.

Original source article: "Recovery is now the expectation for mental illness." Sun Journal (http://www.newbernsj.com), April 25 2005