Announcements
Mental Health Awareness Month
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and we’d like to change the conversation around this. Too often, the conversation that occurs during this month focuses on diagnosing people with mental illness and attributing their symptoms to a biochemical brain disease. Social and environmental factors are often not recognized as contributors to emotional distress and crisis. Here at NEC, we want to shift the conversation to acknowledge the role that environmental factors including trauma and oppression including structural racism, misogyny, cissexism, and sizeism play in our mental health. To us, Mental Health Awareness Month means raising awareness of the ways that our psychological well-being is not merely an individual issue; it is intricately linked to the health and well-being of our society and communities.
As part of Mental Health Awareness Month, we want to raise awareness of the multitude of peer led programs and services available that highlight the role of environmental factors in our mental health and support people in feeling heard and accepted rather than diagnosed and “fixed.” Peer led services including the Hearing Voices Network, peer respites, and warmlines, as well as educational programs like Emotional CPR, focus on providing a safe space for people to share their stories and know that they are not alone. These programs promote connection and community as a way to heal from crisis rather than biomedical treatment.
We also want to highlight paradigms that honor the diversity of our cognitive and emotional styles without pathologizing difference as illness or abnormality. Neurodiversity and Mad Pride are two paradigms that view psychiatric, emotional, and neurological disabilities as a naturally occurring form of human diversity that can be viewed as a positive source of identity rather than abnormalities that need to be treated or cured. They promote acceptance and accommodation rather than cure.
At NEC, we believe that the issue of mental health is complex, and the narrative that emotional distress is solely or primarily the result of a biological brain disease is oversimplistic. We want to recognize the multitude of programs, services, and activist initiatives that are challenging this narrative and adding nuance to an important conversation. We believe that this contributes to the healing, dignity, and recovery of those of us who have been through emotional distress and crisis.
To celebrate Mental Health Month, we suggest you start here at the National Empowerment Center by exploring our website and perhaps starting by clicking here to read these amazing recovery stories.
Moving Toward a Human Rights Approach to Mental Health, published in Community Mental Health Journal, by Jim Probert
Article Abstract: The University of Florida Counseling and Wellness Center (UFCWC) has implemented peer support and professional training programs to address human rights identified within advocacy groups comprised of individuals who have, themselves, been diagnosed with mental illness. These programs are moving the UFCWC toward fulfilling a 2017 United Nations report emphasizing rights-based professional training, provision of genuine informed consent, and availability of non-compromised peer support alternatives. Collaborating with student peers, four UFCWC faculty members have facilitated forms of peer support developed within service-user movements, while openly identifying experiences of reclaiming their own lives from the impacts of adversity, intense mental distress, and traumatizing responses of others to their distress. In the wake of the current pervasive health, economic, and social justice crises, professionals have a collective opportunity to recognize the human experience and rights of those suffering mental distress. These UFCWC programs offer one example of steps taken toward that goal.
Click here to read the article.
NEC’s Kimberly Ewing Featured on Indy Now TV on Fox 59
NEC’s emotional CPR coordinator, Kimberly Ewing, was featured on Indy TV Now on Fox 59 on March 25th. She spoke about how emotional CPR training equips individuals to help those going through an emotional crisis or trauma. Click here to view her interview.
Webinar Recording Now Available: Youth Empowerment and Self-Discovery through Emotional CPR in Schools
A SAMHSA-sponsored two-part series webinar presented by the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery
Presenters: Sean Perry and Felicity Therese Krueger
Webinar Description:
Incorporating peer-led support programs for youth as part of school-based mental health support is critical in eliminating stigma surrounding mental health challenges, increasing a sense of hope, and promoting behavioral health equity. Access to peer-led support is increasingly important as we continue to face a global pandemic and its long-term cumulative effects that have drastically changed the ways that youth navigate the world.
This webinar will explore how Youth Emotional CPR, a public health program that teaches participants from ages 16 to 25 how to support themselves and each other amidst emotional distress, can be successfully introduced in the public school setting and yield positive outcomes for students who participate. The presenters will explain how learning to connect (C), emPower (P), and revitalize (R) can teach youth about the power of mutual support, nonverbal connections, active listening, and finding the healer within. They will explore the concept of “empowerment” and discuss how it can give youth the tools to advocate for themselves on their journeys to healing and wellness, which can then lead to building a more compassionate and supportive community. The presenters will also share some strategies for introducing Youth eCPR to various school systems.
After the webinar, the participants will be invited to an interactive discussion on February 28th where they can get a firsthand experience of Youth eCPR, ask additional questions, and share their thoughts on how school systems could support youth in finding empowerment and the healer within themselves.
Objectives:
1. Learn about the C = connect, P = empower, and R = revitalize of the eCPR program and how these elements can work together to support youth in emotional distress in the school setting.
2. Explore how the concept of “empowerment” can help youth advocate for themselves in their wellness journey.
3. Learn about strategies to introduce Youth eCPR to youth, school systems, community members, and other stakeholders.
Click here to view the recording of Part 1.
Promising Evidence of the Role of Emotional CPR: Co-Immunity Through Community CPR
A recent editorial by Daniel Fisher points out that social-emotional connecting can improve a person’s immune response. We are calling this Co-immunity through community. Since Emotional CPR has been shown to improve emotional connecting, this editorial suggests that Emotional CPR can improve Co-immunity to COVID. Click here to read the editorial.
Emotional CPR: Heart-Centered Peer Support
NEC’s COO Oryx Cohen and Youth Emotional CPR Trainer Briza Gavidia were recently featured on the Mad in America podcast to discuss how Emotional CPR can be utilized to assist youth in emotional crisis. Click here to listen to the podcast episode.
“Meet Daniel Fisher of NEC in Lawrence”
NEC’s Daniel Fisher was recently profiled in Boston Voyager. Click here to read about Daniel Fisher and his work with the National Empowerment Center, Emotional CPR, and National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery.
Peer and Non-Peer Academic Scientists and Peer Support Specialist Community of Practice Stakeholder Engagement to Advance the Science of Peer Support
Dan Fisher is one of the authors of this article: Peer and Non-Peer Academic Scientists and Peer Support Specialist Community of Practice: Stakeholder Engagement to Advance the Science of Peer Support. Click here to view the article online and here to download a PDF of the article.
Hudson to Launch Emotional CPR Program
The Hudson Health Department received a grant to offer NEC’s Emotional CPR training to multiple sectors of the Hudson community, such as the business community, first responders, town department, school staff, and the library. Hudson will be the first community in the country to have multiple sectors trained in eCPR. For more information, click here.
New Resource: The Advocates’ Guide 2020
The Advocates’ Guide: An Educational Primer on Federal Programs and Resources Related to Affordable Housing andCommunity Development is, as the title suggests, a guide to affordable housing. But on many levels it is much more than that. The guide comprises hundreds of pages of useful resources and practical knowhow, written by leading experts in the affordable housing and community development field with a common purpose: to educate advocates and affordable housing providers of all kinds about the programs and policies that make housing affordable and accessible to low-income people across America.
Click here for the guidebook.
Recent Work
Webinar: Emotional CPR Brings Hope, Life and Community to a Sad World
British Columbia Psychosocial Rehabilitation | Advanced Practice is very pleased to announce a webinar with Dr. Daniel Fisher CEO of The National Empowerment Center, and Shontelle Prokipcak from Mental Health and Addiction Services of Ottawa! Click here for the webinar overview
Recent Interview with NEC’s Dan Fisher on Polish Radio Station
Daniel Fisher was recently interviewed in Katowice,Poland by a TV station. There is an introduction in Polish, but rest of interview is in English with translation into Polish. See below for the interview.
Updated Hearing Voices Curriculum Now Available!
Originally developed by Dr. Pat Deegan, the NEC Hearing Voices Curriculum now includes updates developed by Dr. Dan Fisher, Oryx Cohen, and Digital Eyes Film. In addition to the original simulation exercises, the updates include a new DVD featuring one of the co-founders of the Hearing Voices Network, Dr. Marius Romme, as well as testimony from voice hearers themselves. The updated curriculum includes new discussion questions that will help participants better understand how they can support voice hearers after the training.
For more information about the curriculum click here.
Learn more about the updated Hearing Voices Curriculum in the video below.
Resource of the Week
Measuring the Promise: A Compendium of Recovery Measures
One of a series of materials produced by the Evaluation [email protected] This compendium provides a resource of current recovery and recovery-related instruments for adult mental health system stakeholders to use in research and evaluation particularly towards the end of identifying evidence-based practices. [Click to view Measuring the Promise (PDF – 7,917KB, 254 pages)]
Learn More about Emotional CPR
Emotional CPR is a training offered by the National Empowerment Center that teaches people how to assist others through an emotional crisis. It was developed by and for people with lived experience of mental health recovery. Click here to learn more.
New Study on Emotional CPR
A new study indicates that eCPR may increase feelings of belonging while increasing supportive behaviors toward individuals with mental health problems and improving clinical outcomes related to positive and negative affect and feelings of loneliness. To access the full-text publication, visit: https://jopm.jmir.org/2021/1/e25867
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Featured Video
An Introduction to Emotional CPR (eCPR)
Finding Our Voice
Finding Our Voice is a program for training emerging c/s/x leaders in advocacy skills and ways of being.
The following video was produced by one our graduates, Miriam Israel using the skills that she learned in our training.