In yesterday’s post for the “Top 5 Ways To Be A Mental Health Advocate,” I wrote about how you can easily become a mental health advocate when you stop yourself and others from promoting mental health stigma.
Today, let’s look at how large mental health advocacy and research organizations can help.
Number Two: Become a mental health advocate when you get involved with large mental health advocacy and research organizations.

This post is part of Celebrity Health Week at the b5media Health & Wellness Channel. For more information about Celebrity Health Week posts here at Mental Health Notes, visit Introducing Celebrity Health Week: Celebrities And Mental Illness.
Now that we’ve nodded in the direction of celebrities who have bipolar disorder, let’s take a look at the illness itself so you can better understand what these famous folks are going through.
Keep in mind that this post is just an overview and by no means meant to act as a substitute for medical professional advice.
I gathered information about bipolar disorder from the same …read more

This post is part of Celebrity Health Week at the b5media Health & Wellness Channel. For more information about Celebrity Health Week posts here at Mental Health Notes, visit Introducing Celebrity Health Week: Celebrities And Mental Illness.
Because we’ve already highlighted the lives of celebrities who’ve battled depression, let’s now take a look at the illness itself so you can better understand what these famous folks are going through.
Keep in mind that this post is just an overview and by no means meant to act as a substitute for medical professional advice.
Actually, I gathered information for this post from three major …read more

OK, so I know I joked earlier that I was in Rolling Stone Magazine, but this is serious.
b5media’s very own Kristina Chew, PhD – the mastermind behind Autism Vox – is going to be on Good Morning America on abc tomorrow morning!
Both Kristina and Ari Ne’eman, the president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), were interviewed about autism, and the director for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Tom Insel, will be in the segment as well.
Be sure to watch Kristina, Ari Ne’eman, and Tom Insel on Good Morning America tomorrow. You may just learn a thing or to …read more

If given the choice, would you rather win the lottery or receive a compliment?
Many of you are probably thinking, “Give me the cash!” However, according to the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, receiving a compliment activates the same area of your brain that’s activated when you receive cash. You may be just as thrilled – or more thrilled – to receive the compliments.
During this research, Dr. Norihiro Sadato and his team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of 19 “healthy” people during to experiments. The first involved the people playing a gambling …read more

In addition to May being Mental Health Awareness Month (or, simply Mental Health Month, depending on where you read about it), the week of May 4-10 is Children’s Mental Health Week and it kicked off with a bang yesterday (May 4) with Childhood Depression Awareness Day.
To help you better understand children’s mental health, or – if you already have a pretty good handle on your child’s mental health – to help you stay current with the goings-on and resources for children’s mental health, I’ve compiled a list of useful Web sites, pages, and articles for you.
You can thank Liberty for …read more

Remember a few Saturday Sanities ago when I tipped you all off on www.everyminute.org and its super cool petition-signing tool? Well, Jace Freeman from www.everyminute.org has graciously sent MHN some more detailed information about the Web site, its mission, and how you can get involved.
I’ll let him do the talking:
everyminute.org is a grassroots campaign organizing a lobbying force to advocate before Congress to accelerate mental health research to promote recovery and resilience through individual treatment plans that eliminate the need for trial and error diagnosis. Funded by a grant from the Jene and Curtis Graves Foundation, the website, http://www.everyminute.org, was …read more