Mental Health Notes - News, Education and Advocacy

Educate Yourself And Others About Mental Health

by Alicia Sparks, Mental Health Notes on September 11th, 2008

Until this point in the “Top 5 Ways To Be A Mental Health Advocate” series here at Mental Health Notes, I’ve given you reasons to stop promoting stigma, a list of large mental health advocacy and research organizations with which you can get involved, and advice on how to get started with mental health support groups.

Today, I want to tell you how important it is to educate yourself and others about mental health. It’s more unlikely that you or anyone else will stigmatize mental illness once you understand it, after all.

Number Four: Become a mental health advocate when you educate yourself and others about mental health.

Regardless of your age, education level, or where you live in the world, there is no reason you can’t be educated and up to date with mental health.

Support groups are great places to learn more about mental health, and the websites of the larger mental health advocacy groups are goldmines for educational mental health information.

In addition to those, you can visit websites like those for the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. (Or, if you live in another country and would prefer to read information from your country’s organizations and associations, a quick “google” of your country’s name and words like “psychiatric” and “psychological” may bring helpful results.)

You can also check out news websites like Science Daily, msnbc’s Mental Health news page, PsychCentral’s Psychology & Mental Health News, and the Mental Health page of Yahoo!News to stay on top of the latest mental health research.

And speaking of the Internet, it’s a great place to make your voice heard. You can start a blog to advocate for mental health awareness and help bust stigma. There are so many free blog sites out there (Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and the blogging features with MySpace and Facebook, to name a few), and if you have a few extra bucks to spare, you may even consider purchasing your own domain.

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up the series with the fifth way you can become a mental health advocate (politics, anyone?), but in the meantime, tell me what kinds of experiences you’ve had with mental health education.

• How have you educated someone about mental health?
• What successes (and failures) have you had with the current mental health-related websites out there?
• Do you run a mental health blog or mental health website?

Image: SXC

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