Wow. Keris Jan Myrick elected president of NAMI

This is a massive change in leadership. I won’t go into what it might mean right now. You all can think about the implications for yourselves. Let’s just say Keris Jan Myrick is a woman who knows something about self-empowerment and healing and could not have been elected without some sort of crack in the foundation of NAMI. The shortcomings of medication, medication, medication is becoming apparent even to the pharma funded monster that NAMI has been for so long.

See on Mad in America: Mad in America Blogger Elected President of NAMI — follow that link to read Keris Jan Myrick’s statement

I’m going to repost something I shared about this inspiring woman a while back as means of re-introducing her:

“Recov­ery hap­pens for me (and I have heard for oth­ers as well) due to a mul­ti­tude of fac­tors”

Keris Myrick the woman featured in the New York Times article by Benedict Carey in the series Lives Restored, Liv­ing with Men­tal Ill­ness responds to the internet summaries of the article. It seems people understood what they wanted about medication and its role in her recovery.

More than anything Keris Myrick is a pragmatist. Do what works. I say Amen to that! What works for me, may not work for you and vice versa. And it’s my mantra that it generally takes a combination of many things that varies from person to person to find health and well-being. Generalizing to everyone based on our own personal experience alone is a recipe for disaster.

From Project Return Peer Support Network Blog

When Bene­dict Carey approached me to be involved in the series of pro­files (Lives Restored, Liv­ing with Men­tal Ill­ness), I was imme­di­ately attracted to his approach; high­light­ing the many resources, skills, tech­niques, sup­ports and cop­ing mech­a­nisms each indi­vid­ual dis­cov­ers and uses to lead mean­ing­ful and full lives despite hav­ing a diag­no­sis of ‘severe men­tal ill­ness’. The series focuses on every­thing that works for a per­son in their recov­ery by shin­ing the light on the many, many things that rarely receive atten­tion and dimin­ish­ing the focus on the role of med­ica­tion. In my pro­file for the series, the word med­ica­tion is used only 4 times in a word count for the entire story of 2, 771.

I am a per­son who val­ues what works for each indi­vid­ual in their recov­ery, from med­ica­tions, to yoga, to walk­ing. We are all dif­fer­ent! I am not anti-medication, I am not pro-medication. What I am is pro-education and choice. I believe each per­son should have as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble so they can make the deci­sions with their treat­ment team, fam­i­lies, and other sup­port­ers that will help them real­ize the mean­ing­ful lives of their dreams.

I find it very inter­est­ing that some of the sum­maries of the New York Times arti­cle, state that my recov­ery was due to “adher­ence to med­ica­tion”. This is not what the arti­cle said nor is it the pri­mary focus of the piece. I started to won­der if peo­ple were miss­ing the point – that recov­ery hap­pens for me (and I have heard for oth­ers as well) due to a mul­ti­tude of fac­tors. The New York Times fea­ture clearly states that work has indeed been my treat­ment of choice. Also, fam­ily sup­port, a great dog, a won­der­ful psy­chi­a­trist with whom I have a strong ther­a­peu­tic rela­tion­ship, and other tech­niques, inclu­sive of med­ica­tions on occa­sion, are all the things that con­tribute to my recov­ery and are the high­light of this profile.

Jour­nal­ist Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, asked me if I would share with him more detailed infor­ma­tion about the use of med­ica­tion in my life… (read the rest here)

Robert Whitaker’s piece about Keris was shared here on Beyond Meds:  A Rorschach Test for Psych Meds.

Read the  New York Times article about Keris here

I wrote a post about how things were finally changing a while back. Later I thought I might have been jumping the gun. But while it remains true that many are still glued mindlessly to the importance of pharmaceutical treatment there really is a change in how many people are considering the gross problems with medications across the board:  Finally the tide is turning — drugs are on the way out