More hope for mental illness survivors

 

Being able to live with the effects of mental health conditions such as; depression, anxiety, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTS and PTSD), seems to come down to how we think and to a degree, how we live our lives.

 

Sounds simple, but it isn’t.

 

United States born and based medical doctor, Neil Nedley, saw a statistical and ever-worsening need for creating help to assist a growing, global problem.

 

Effective programme: The Nedley Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program offers more help for mental illness sufferers.

 

What his research says is - a quarter of the US population, suffers from disordered mental health issues. That’s a lot of people.

 

So, he decided to come up with a programme, the Nedley Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program, to get on top of these often, debilitating and exhausting illnesses.

 

Exhausting illnesses: Conditions such as anxiety can be ongoing and become tiring to sufferers, disrupting all or many areas of life, including sleep.

 

He bases his programme, which is currently being run in four New Zealand centres including Dargaville in Northland, around ‘hits’ or areas of an individual’s life, which have strong bearings on the person’s mental health – even including developmental and genetic problems; which can’t be changed.

 

Nedley looks at ways to change the individual’s current focus on what has gone on in the past and how the person processes present and future events in his/her life.

 

Example scenario; your wife/husband/partner breaks up with you. The jilted person without help may say, ‘this is the end. I can’t stand that this has happened. It’s devastating’.

 

Nedley’s idea of processing that event in a healing way, could be; ‘yes he/she broke up with me and it’s very sad indeed but it’s not the end of the world and just because my wife/husband/partner has left me, doesn’t mean I am unlovable.’

 

Nedley stresses, this positive self-talk isn’t designed to minimise the event - which can be very difficult emotionally and has practical ramifications as well - but the healing self-talk gives the jilted person a way of being able to, ‘make room’, for the loss and allows him/her to be able to live with the effects of it.

 

Through an 8-week course, people can go along to a weekly, two-hour workshop.

For the first hour, they are shown a video, where Nedley talks about his researched, ‘way out’ of depression and anxiety; including numerous statistics backing up the emotional and physical effects of these illnesses; as well as the cost to individual households of sufferers, cost to wider communities, to health systems and more widely, to nations.

Attendees fill in a workbook during the video address, which helps them to understand in more detail, the information in the video.

 

In the second hour, attendees are split off into groups; where facilitators encourage them to look deeper in to aspects of the programme.

 

Module by module, over the 8 weeks, attendees fill out questionnaires and make lists of how aspects of the programme could be applied to their lives. Attendees are also encouraged to share their experiences if they wish. However, there is no pressure at all to do this.

 

At the conclusion of the programme, attendees graduate with a presentation dinner, put on by the facilitating organisation.

 

In New Zealand, the programme is run in only four centres so far; Dargaville, Hamilton, Blenheim and Christchurch and is facilitated by the Seventh Day Adventist Church and there is a strong encouragement for attendees to have an anchoring belief system working in their lives.

 

It appears even usual health-based mental health programmes, also encourage people to have some kind of strong personal belief system, such as mindfulness, yoga, meditation – the list goes on (whatever is right for the individual).

 

Mental health problems can bring with them, complete life-altering situations. And having an anchor for the inner self, seems to give people something to hang on to, to steady themselves, while trying to survive the turbulence mental illness brings with it.

 

There is a cost to the Nedley programme, but it is well worth it! Check it out.

 

For more information about the Nedley Depression & Anxiety Recovery Program

Contact Lisa Liggett on 0211179667, phone or text.