The following is summarized from the NAMI ADVOCATE (March/April 1997)
-- NAMI = National Association for Mentally Ill,
a grassroots/family organization focusing on schizophrenia,
schizophrenia-affect, bi-polar, depression, obsessive-compulsive, etc.
Title: Update: Campaign to End Discrimination
Subtitle: Reach out to legislators, business leaders, and the media in 1997
Science and Treatment Kit will show you how
By: Ann MacDonald, Campaign Regional Director, East
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Photo of kit caption: This Science and Treatment Kit is the latest resource
provided to the grassroots by the Campaign to End Discrimination.
The kit will be on loan to anyone from state offices in late March.
They are limited and sent only to each state AMI office, so you will
have to share within your state. Please note that these kits are not
available from the NAMI (National AMI) office.
--------------
Text: Do you want to increase media coverage of the science and treatment
of brain disorders? Educate legislators by showing them that brain
disorders are like other physical illnesses? Reach civic groups and
business leaders who may be willing to support your work.
Worthy goals, all of them. But how do you do it? Especially if you,
like most affiliate and state leaders, are overwhelmed with too much
to do and too little time to do it.
Take heart. The Campaign's Science and Treatment Kit will provide you
with the presentation materials to do such outreach and a step-by-step
guide to how to use it to your advocacy advantage. The kit is a perfect
example of the kinds of products the campaign will be offering you on
a regular basis in the next year -- tools that will advance your own
state's or affiliate's objectives while communicating the campaign's
message points: Mental illnesses are brain disorders; treatment works;
discrimination must end.
Unveiled at NAMI's February legislative conference in Arlington, the
kits will be distributed to representatives of all 50 states affiliates
at the St. Louis state coordinators' training in late March. They
contain a brain model and pictures showing the physical differences
in brains that are affected by brain disorders. They also contain
a video featuring researchers from the National Institute of Mental
Health -- including its director, Steven Hyman, M.D. -- who discuss
the physical origins of brain disorders and new advances in treatment.
One of our strongest weapons against discrimination is science.
In the last few years, the overwhelming weight of medical research has
demonstrated that mental illnesses are biologically based and that
effective treatment works. The kit will give you the tools to
communicate the latest scientific information about brain disorders
to three key audiences: business leaders, legislators, and reporters.
These people, who are the "influentials" and "multipliers" at the top
of the Campaign pyramid, have the power to act on this information
and put an end to discrimination.
At the same time, you may want to reach these key audiences to advance
your own state's particular goals. Few affiliates, for instance, are
completely satisfied with their current fund-raising efforts. Many
have intended to do greater outreach to business and civic groups in
the hope of broadening their base of financial support. The Science
and Treatment Kit gives you the tools to do so.
And for those who already feel overworked and overwhelmed, rest assured
that the kit is user-friendly. It includes separate sections for
explaining how to use its materials when making presentations to the
media, business leaders, or legislators. It also has step-by-step
guides to how to make a presentation, handle questions, provide
recognition and thanks to the person who invited you to talk, and
enlist new members for your affiliate and NAMI.
We think you will enjoy using the Science and Treatment Kit. And
we hope it will help your state or local affiliate achieve its
own goals -- whether those goals are persuading a legislator to
vote for parity, finding a reporter willing to do a feature about
brain disorders and their treatment, or convincing a business to
provide financial support for the work you are doing.
--------------
Dotted Sidebar: Clip and Duplicate
Title: How businesses can help end discrimination against people
with brain disorders.
1. Understand that one in five American families -- and therefore
one in five employees in a company -- has a loved one with a serious
brain disorder such as depression, manic depression, schizophrenia,
panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
2. Recognize that brain disorders are biologically based illnesses,
just like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. To treat brain disorders
differently from other illnesses is discriminatory. Yet nine out of
ten health insurance policies do just that.
3. Acknowledge that treatment works. Currently 60 percent of people
with schizophrenia respond to treatment, as do 65 percent of people
with manic depression, and 80 percent of people with depression. Those
success rates are equal to, and in some cases greater than, the success
rates for treatment of other diseases. Only about 50 percent of
people with heart disease respond to treatment, for instance.
4. Realize that the cost of treating severe mental illness is comparable
of less than the costs to treat other serious illnesses. It costs
the same amounts per year to treat someone with schizophrenia, for
instance, as it does to treat someone with severe diabetes.
5. Learn how affordable providing equitable health insurance can be.
Study after study, and the experience of other businesses, has shown that
equitable health insurance coverage adds less than one percent to
premium costs per year. These costs are more than offset by reduced
absenteeism due to illness and increased productivity as a result of
treatment.
6. Consider providing equitable health insurance for your employees.
NAMI will be glad to show you how.
--------------End dotted sidebar------------
End article---------------------------------
My message:
-----------
I hope this will help PAN and the Udall Bill workers on this list.
I feel that we have been somewhat self-centered and myoptic.
When I attended the PAN '95 Forum, I bought a copy of the
Alzhiemers Public Policy Forum notes held in Washington a month earlier.
I envied the Alzhiemers effort because it was more complete and
suggested that we join together into an alliance with other brain
disorders to lobby congress and the media. No one seemed interested then.
Strategically, I think, we'd be much more persuasive as "all brain
diseases/disorders in unison". We need to balance the inequity in per
capita, or per death, funding. Idealy for the nation, NIH funding should
substantially grow and all diseases should get a fair share of attention.
In this is the win-win optimal we should seek, I think.
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