Niya McCray-Brown
Hi everyone. It’s a real pleasure to be in this space with you and to share space with you around mental health in particular. My name is Niya McCray-Brown, just like Meagan mentioned, and I am the Director of Community Engagement at Mental Health America’s national office. I’m going to share my screen because I have a presentation to share with you all to spot some of the resources that we offer from our national office, but I’ll also be sharing some information about our national affiliates. We have almost 150 affiliates nationwide. So the chances that there’s an MHA near you is high. We are missing, I believe it’s four states out of the 50. So if there’s not an affiliate near you, hopefully we can provide you some support from our national office. Just give me one sec so I can share my screen. Fantastic. Everyone should be able to see that now. Can I get a thumbs up? Okay, yes, we are good to go. Awesome. So Mental Health America is actually the nation’s first mental health advocacy organization. I know you guys might be familiar with others, such as NAMI, or the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, AFSP. A lot of those other organizations are actually born out of the movement that was started in 1909 by Mental Health America. And we focus primarily on mental health advocacy and breaking mental health stigma through the lens of research, public education, and our national affiliate work, where they provide direct services to the community.

This is just a little bit of information about our founder. His name is Clifford Beers. And Clifford Beers is actually an individual who had lived experience of a mental health condition and experienced firsthand a lot of the disparities and just unfortunate oppression that existed in the mental health system of institutionalization in the early 1900’s. He founded our movement by just sharing a really pivotal quote that we like to express in a lot of our work now, which is that he wanted to fight in the open. Unfortunately, so many folks who experience mental health concerns and mental health conditions feel like they have to do so by themselves and they have to do so behind closed doors. And so a big part of our movement is around breaking stigma, and just allowing folks to talk about their mental health openly, and giving them the tools to do so as well.

This is a little bit about our mission statement and some of the lovely staff that I get to work with every day at our national office. Mental Health America advances the mental health and well being of all Americans through direct service, public education, research, advocacy and public policy. We drive progress with the public health perspective through community based solutions and a National agenda. So what that means is that even though we are at the national office, we do a lot of our work and reports to appeal to a wide variety of folks across the Nation. We really aim to meet folks where they’re at in communities that they serve, so that they have tools that they need to impact real change day by day, as well.

This is just a snapshot of Mental Health America and our national office. So we have 143 local affiliates in 39 states. So we’re actually missing 11 states out of the 50. And we have 6.9k staff, including our national office, that serve individuals across the country. This is just a little bit more information about some of the work that we do and I’m going to talk about these programs along the side, more in-depth on future slides.

So one of the biggest things that we do is public education. And this is probably where there’s going to be a lot of takeaways for those of you in the audience today. We do about nine campaigns throughout the year where we focus on providing information to individuals across the country on a variety of mental health topics, different populations, including youth and their parents and caregivers, teachers, coaches. May is Mental Health Month, so that’s usually when we have our largest campaign that’s meant to provide information about mental health basics, Mental Health 101, information about different mental health conditions and strategies that you can use to promote wellbeing and prevention in your mental health regardless of what phase of your journey you are in.

July is BIPOC Mental Health Month. So we do a lot of promotion and campaigns in July around mental health for BIPOC communities and the distinct disparities that exist for those communities, as well as the ways that they thrive despite those disparities. You can see an example of some of these images on the slide right now. And then we also do research reports. So individuals who are really focused on maybe academic implications or political implications of the work that we do, can use our reports to talk to policymakers, professors, different folks in higher education to be able to convey the importance of mental health in their communities as well. We also do webinars. So similar to what you guys are doing right now, Mental Health America does about two to three webinars per month on a variety of categories. We actually have one today. I’m speaking to one of my good colleagues, Jackie, who runs our webinar program. I was like you and I are going to be doing the same thing in just a few moments, which is talking to folks about their mental health. But if you guys are interested, I’ll actually include links to our webinar catalog, if you will, all of the different topics that we’ve covered. But we like to cover a wide variety of information there, including we’ve done some webinars on those with chronic illness, we’ve done some on parenting, we’ve done someone just general goal setting, we typically try to do that around the new year, because everybody’s like new year/new me. And just a variety of resources that we keep in our webinar catalog. But we have so much information. There’s so much information in our toolkits, so much information on our website through articles and blogs. And that’s really a testament of our public education department and all of the hard work that they do there.

Our screening program is also really popular and just like Meagan was mentioning before, mental health is a journey and at Mental Health America, we believe that folks ebb and flow from wellness to sickness throughout their lifetime. There’s not just like those people over there who have a mental health condition. All of us have a mind and therefore all of us have moments of prosperity and thriving, and some of us have moments of suffering. And so our goal is to kind of meet individuals where they are regardless of where they are on that spectrum and be able to provide supports. One of the ways that we do that is through our National Screening and Prevention Program, where we offer 11 unique screenings on a variety of mental health conditions from anxiety, to depression to ADHD. And the screenings are usually pretty quick to take, they take about 10 minutes to complete. They’re anonymous, they are completely confidential, and they’re free. So if you’re ever having a concern, or even if you just would like to kind of check in on your mental health, you can go to the MHA screening program, select a screening, which will also provide links to and I believe there’s going to be a handout with some of that information after today as well. But you can go and take a screening and then after you take it, it’ll give you some information about how you score and you can use that to talk to a primary care provider or family member, a loved one or your therapist if you have contact with one about some of the things that popped up on that screening. And different next steps. We provide a few next steps. So we’ll provide DIY tools, worksheets, different things that you can do to prioritize your mental health based on your results. But if you’d like to use them to kind of find support in your community, you can use your screening results on that as well. Our main goal with offering the screening program is for folks to have autonomy and independence with their screening and to have self awareness about how mental health is showing up in their daily lives. So that they can seek the support that they need either from the results that we offer or in the communities that they exist within.

These are some of the things that our screening is meant to assess. So we like to use very plain language when we’re describing some of the symptoms that might pop up for an individual who’s experiencing a mental health condition. Things like feeling sad, empty, hopeless, or worthless are some of the things that we assess in our screening program, as well as feeling moody or anxious. We don’t like to use a lot of scientific language because we want everyone to feel that they have access to the mental health support that they need and that literacy should not be a barrier to receiving that support. So this is some of the plain language that we use in our screening program and in some of our public education materials as well just to support folks in being able to get connected to the next step of support.

And this is some information that you can use to get in contact with us. If you have a question, if you want to submit some feedback to our national office, you can do so either by phone, or you can get in contact with us online. And then there’s some of our social media handles at the bottom as well. That’s all I’ve got. From what I understand, there’s going to be a question and answer portion later so if anybody has any specific questions about our work or the ways that you can utilize our resources, I’d be happy to answer those questions. And then while the other presenters get going, I’ll drop some specific links into the chat.