The science is there, and we need to be able to apply the science, of course. But we also need to be aware that the person we’re talking to may not fit into the schemas that we’re using at any particular time.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chronic mental illness and cognitive disorders affects 57.7 million Americans each year and interferes with a person’s ability to work, learn, or even enjoy life with families, friends or others in society. Few people are trained to be aware of ways to communicate with and help people who are unable to fully function because of great personal and family suffering. Because of lack of awareness and consciousness about these issues, we medicalize and marginalize people with drugs and isolation. We can do better!
Pacific Institute Awakenings Institute of Mental wellness (AIMW) is the first ever multi-disciplinary center dedicated to research, education, and treatment of chronic mental illnesses with a humane and holistic alternate approach. We bring together the world-class resources and colleges from across Northern California and the result is a unified approach to diagnosing, understanding, treating--and eventually preventing the problems associated with so called mental illness.
Mental illness is a label that in most of the cases -at least as reported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)- is diagnosed based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV). Health professionals and consumers have routinely criticized the DSM-IV as a cold taxonomic tool that is not reliable.
Therefore when the NIMH states that mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally and that an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, we at Pacific Institute believe that The DSM-IV represents the perspective only of some mental health professionals. There are other interested parties in the mental health system, especially the patients (many of whom consider themselves to be customers or clients, and not patients), and the family members. Their perspectives are not represented in the DSM-IV nomenclature and we have a responsibility to represent them all.
Ongoing research conducted within the Pacific Institute’s AIMW allows us to continually improve our care options. We study and evolve new models for healing, education, treatment, prevention, and for minimizing recurrence and stigma.
Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
- Joshua J. Marine
