Mental Health Awareness

Published 8:50 pm Tuesday, October 17, 2017

During the first week of October each year, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, holds mental illness awareness week.

A quick look at the calendar will show that we’re past that part of October, already moving into the middle of the month.

However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all take a few minutes to read up on mental illness, and to see how we can help those that are affected.

NAMI focused on numerous specific mental health conditions this year — obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, dual diagnosis, depression, schizophrenia and psychosis.

Approximately one in five adults In the United States — or 18.5 percent — experience mental illness in a year. One in 25 adults experiences a serious mental illness that substantially interferes with or limits their major life activities, according to NAMI.

If it’s not true now, there’s a good chance that at some point in your life, you or someone in your life will experience a mental illness.

Anyone that would like to help can go to the nami.org website and donate. There’s also walks raising mental health awareness throughout the year.