Alliance of Mental Illness
The National Alliance of Mental Illness (150-word response)
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) was founded in 1979 in Madison Wisconsin. It was a grassroots group created by family members diagnosed with mental illness in order to create a group that advocates, supports, and provides resources for those who have mental illnesses. It is important to understand that the target audience of the group was not medical staff or counselors. Instead, it was focused on providing resources to people with mental illnesses, their friends, and their family members. NAMI is a national organization that partners with 500 local affiliates to allow education on mental health illness to be provided to those who need it. The triple aim has 3 major goals: improving the perception of individual care, helping improve the healthcare of the population and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare (Sikka, et al., 2015). NAMI’s website hosts information that is useful to the mental health patients by providing resources and community support while giving information on how to find crisis contact numbers in emergencies (Phillips, 2020).
NAMI does not include EBP in its mission, vision, philosophy, and /or goals section. However, NAMI states that they use EBP to educate their members (National Alliance on Mental Illness in certain parts of their websites [NAMI], 2020a). Currently, NAMI has four designated programs that are considered EPB programs. NAMI uses research that is based on EBP with the goal of providing higher quality care for its constituents. EBP has been proven to lead to a better quality of care, improve the outcomes of the patients, reduce cost, and even provide the nurses with better satisfaction (Melynk et al., 2010).
NAMI has a program called Family-to-Family which provided families and friends who have a mental health condition to understand the illness, provide coping skills, and provides education to these members based on EBP. It is crucial to remember that NAMI is created for those with mental illnesses and their family members and is not necessarily tailored to clinicians and nurses. The NAMI website has a “find help” link that will provide multiple credible resources to help anyone find the mental health resource they need for themselves or to a family member (Phillips, 2020).
