N.H. program prompts healing

N.H. program prompts healing
(February 2009 Issue)

By Jennifer Chase Esposito

Annette Carbonneau's son Matthew was 18 before she learned that there were support services available that would've brought her out of isolation years earlier.

With Matthew's social phobia, ADHD and bipolar disorder, and her father, Harold, having lived with untreated bipolar disorder until his death, Carbonneau had made the rounds for treatment across New England at Children's Hospital and large mental health facilities in New Hampshire for nearly two decades. But it wasn't until a newspaper article advertising a course taught by a husband-and-wife team that she learned about New Hampshire's branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

"When I had my children I didn't know anything about genetic predisposition," says Carbonneau. "It really wasn't until I started learning more that I put two and two together and over the last 10 years, I've looked at my experiences with my dad and now truly understand and wish I'd had insight when he was still alive."

Enthralled by NAMI and its support groups and programs for families with mental illness, Carbonneau started volunteering in 2000 and was one of the organization's go-to speakers when legislators needed to hear a family member testify to her story and background. Five years later, she joined NAMI staff as community and volunteer developer. And in 2008, after bringing the initial idea to NAMI-NH Executive Director Mike Cohen in 2005, Carbonneau helped launch her program Life Interrupted, to help NAMI add faces to stories of families recovering and healing from the anguish caused by mental illness.

Life Interrupted provides families a way to educate their communities about mental illness recovery. In the last year, NAMI-NH has trained 11 volunteer "speakers" - adult family members of people suffering from mental illnesses - to share their stories in front of both large and small groups. The goals are to help audiences understand the family perspective on mental illness; to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness by demonstrating that family recovery is possible; and to instill hope.

In the last year, 44 presentations were made to groups as varied as Kiwanis, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Legal Division, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital; and to college students studying psychology and nursing; firemen; and the mental health professional community at large.

"My personal family experience is what triggered me," says Carbonneau, a Massachusetts native now living in New Hampshire. "One of my roles is to educate professionals, the community, and mental health providers. I found that we could give all the information we wanted, but once you give your personal story and put a face with it, you make a huge impact."

Carbonneau knows first hand the impact made by Life Interrupted presentations: She's told her personal story in 22 presentations.

"I do a lot of work presenting the family perspective," says Carbonneau, whose son is now 27. "I really wanted to see NAMI reach people like myself, who didn't know there were things to help me help my son.

"You see people in the grocery store, and they'd ask you, 'How are you?' You hear people talk about their kids having a broken leg or appendicitis. But no one talks about mental illness the way we talk about an accident or cancer," she says. "If I'd heard another mom tell her story, I would've thought, 'Well, I'm not alone.' I would've come out of personal isolation years earlier."

Presentations are free and Carbonneau says NAMI-NH will bring Life Interrupted to any group that requests it. A Life Interrupted Presenter Training has been developed and continues to be refined as an online program training for states wishing to implement the program across the country.