Saturday, October 6, 2007

Starting off...Speaking about Anti-Stigma Campaigns.


The anti-stigma presentation at the NYAPRS 25th anniversary conference was a success. The interstate panel on dealing Reducing Stigma in the Community was comprised of Linda Wilson, the executive director of NAMI Staten Island, , Michelle Mullen, MA and Ann Murphy, MA of UMDNJ and myself, Larry Hochwald, this blogs facilitator.

Michelle and Ann said that they would be forwarding some materials from their part of the discussion to post here on the blog. I will be helping Linda to prepare some materials to place on the blog as well. Also, I will begin to place materials from my conference presentation here to help kick off the blog.

I discussed the need for comprehensive anti-stigma campaigning, a lot of it, being done by everyone and anyone involved in behavioral health.

We need to define our campaigning better and we need to remember that there are two general audiences we can target. If we target anybody but our nation's youth, we can only hope to modify and moderate opinions to the point that we can achieve our goals. If we target youth, whose opinions may not be fully formed even if influenced by their parents and teachers, we can hope to affect major change and develop a generation where stigma can be a thing of the past. To illustrate I presented the following chart, to help to show some of the results of some research that I've been involved with. I am attaching it here, whatever part of the post the blog will allow it to.

We need to get across to government agencies that anti-stigma campaigning needs to be a top priority. Stigma affects everything else---housing, employment, everything. The good thing for service providers and private agencies is that anti-stigma campaigns can be effective for your marketing and employee retention initiatives. Anti-stigma campaigns can also increase the need for services, and adherence to treatment. For consumers and providers alike, anti-stigma campaigns can make it easier to manage day to day. We shall examine all of these ideas specifically in separate posts.



3 comments:

Bruce said...

Welcome to the blogosphere.

I look forward to seeing more of your material.

Targeting youth may be particularly wise. Anti-smoking campaigns have focused successfully on youth.

School-base presentations thru health classes?

Facilitator-Larry said...

Thank you. We appreciate your being our first to comment! Let me just note here that for upcoming forum discussions, it would be helpful, whenever someone would like to be included, that they email the facilitator at mhasinfo@yahoo.com and let me know what IM software you use (Yahoo, AOL, etc.) so we can put together a database and also work to get everyone on the same compatible page to coordinate things. I will recreate this message as a post when we get closer to scheduling an online discussion group.

Facilitator-Larry said...

In response to the rest of your comment, NAMI has a school based presentation and the two colleagues I mentioned from UMDNJ are also researching a similar program they are doing in the High Schools and Colleges. You should be seeing more on this soon.