A four-day program this week hopes to focus attention on the growing mental health crisis nationwide and here in the Upper Cumberland.
Livingston’s Seventh-day Adventist Fellowship invites you to Mindfit, beginning Thursday. Livingston Physician Dr. Kenneth Colburn said the program offers awareness of the issues and how they impact people from every background.
“We don’t claim to be therapists,” Colburn said. “You know, we’re not going to be counseling people or having, you know, we’re not psychiatrists, we’re not therapists. But it’s information. It’s opening our minds, helping us to explore issues that many times are pushed in the back of the closet. Nobody wants to talk about giving a platform for that to be discussed openly and hopefully deepened understanding.”
Colburn said there’s still a lot of stigma around mental health, stigma that keeps people from asking for help.
“One of the goals is to open discussion also for family members who may not suffer themselves, as far as they know, from mental illness,” Colburn said. “They have other loved ones that may, may be suffering. So helping them to have understanding and sensitivity and being able to work with compassion with their family members and friends who do suffer from mental illnesses.”
Colburn said he wants people to see mental health as no different than a problem with another organ inside the body. Sometimes, the way mental health has been dealt with in the past, Colburn said, was not correct.
“I have this illness, and when it comes to my brain, I don’t want to admit, and nobody wants to admit that I’ve got this illness and I need help,” said. “And so that keeps people hiding, that keeps people away from therapy, away from treatment, and that just increases pain and the severity of the disease actually, in the long run, which is tragic.”
Colburn said people need to understand how mental health is really about full body health. “Not just drugs, not just talking, not just psychotherapy, not just this or that, but the whole package comes together to enhance our healing,” Colburn said.
You can register for the program at MindFitEvent.Com or call 844-313-1000. The sixty-minute sessions will include discussions, a video presentation, and questions. The program begins nightly at 6:30pm.
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