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Education Programs

Family-to-Family Education Program

The NAMI Family-to-Family Education Program is a free 12-week course for family members or caregivers of individuals with severe brain disorders (mental illnesses). The course is taught by trained family members. All instruction and course materials are free for class participants.

The Family-to-Family curriculum focuses on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (manic depression), clinical depression, panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The course discusses the clinical treatment of these illnesses and teaches the knowledge and skills that family members need to cope more effectively.

Peer-to-Peer: NAMI's Recovery Curriculum

Peer-to-Peer is a unique, experiential learning program for people with any serious mental illness who are interested in establishing and maintaining their wellness and recovery. The course was written by Kathryn Cohan, a person with a psychiatric disability who is also a former provider and manager in the mental health field and a longtime mutual support group member and facilitator. An advisory board comprised of consumer members of NAMI, in consultation with Joyce Burland, Ph.D., author of the successful NAMI Family-to-Family Education Program, helped guide the curriculum's development.

• Peer-to-Peer consists of nine two-hour units and is taught by a team of three trained "mentors" who are personally experienced at living well with mental illness.

• Mentors are trained in weekend-long training sessions, supplied with teaching manuals, and are paid a stipend for each course they teach.

• Participants come away from the course with a binder of hand-out materials, as well as many other tangible resources: an advance directive; a "relapse prevention plan" to help identify tell-tale feelings, thoughts, behavior or events that may warn of impending relapse and to organize for intervention; mindfulness exercises to help focus and calm thinking; and survival skills for working with providers and the general public.

NAMI Provider Education Program: Teaching Those Who Serve Us

The NAMI Provider Education Program presents a penetrating, subjective view of family and consumer experiences with serious mental illness to line staff at public agencies who work directly with people with severe and persistent brain disorders. The course helps providers realize the hardships that families and consumers endure and appreciate the courage and persistence it takes to find ways to reconstruct lives which must be lived, through no fault of the consumer or family, "on the verge."

The Provider Course emphasizes the involvement of consumers in the challenging work of provider-staff training. The teaching team consists of five people:

• two family members trained as NAMI Family-to-Family Education Program teachers;
• two consumers who are knowledgeable about their own mental illness, have a supportive relationship with their families, and are dedicated to the process of recovery; and
• a mental health professional who is also a family member or consumer.

Few teaching programs employ consumers in this kind of sustained training effort in which they are paid to participate on a teaching team as they present a 10-week course.

The course reflects a new knowledge base, the "lived experiences" of coping with a brain disorder or caring for someone who struggles with this life-long challenge. Including this deeply personal perspective creates an appreciable difference in the program's content. It adds a means of teaching the emotional aspects and practical consequences of these illnesses to the academic medical information in the course.

In written evaluations and in focus-group surveys of their reactions to these classes, staff members reported that the course was fresh, relevant, helpful, enlightening, and emotionally overwhelming.

Participants felt that not only had their approach towards families changed, but that their understanding of consumers' dealing-with-life dilemmas had expanded as well. Almost every participant described how his or her own clinical practice had changed because of what was learned in class.

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