Presenter: Sara Hatfield, Public Health Science, Global Public Health Scholars
For my practicum project, I interned at a local office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in Mercer County, New Jersey. NAMI Mercer works to empower individuals and families affected by mental illness through education, advocacy, and listening. They operate a HelpLine during the week where individuals in the county can call in to receive resources, or just talk to a trained, compassionate volunteer. I was able to volunteer for the HelpLine during my time at NAMI, and I also worked closely with the Director of Develop. I learned how to write, search for, and apply for grants from the local to national level. I also worked to create and implement new mental health awareness programs in high schools in my area; we were able to
implement new stigma-prevention programs in five schools during my internship. I worked at NAMI for eight weeks, four days a week, for four to five hours a day.
Hi Sara! I really enjoyed your presentation and I agree that mental health is extremely important so I am glad organizations such as these exist to help individuals who may need it. I haven’t worked at a volunteer organization like this and I am curious about how it functions. Did you need to receive training before being an individual on call lines and how did they prepare you for this? Were there times that you felt overly helpless because all you can do is listen to someone’s struggles and you wish you could do more? Also, are volunteers for the helpline taught to recognize symptoms in themselves that might suggest they needed to focus on their own mental health before…
This was a really well done presentation! The internship that you did sounds like it was very interesting. How did it feel to help people on the helpline? Did the situations that people were in ever affect you mentally?
Great presentation Sara! You provide a lot of important information about mental health, and the work that NAMI does. I am curious, after having two very different roles within the organization, did you prefer working with people through the helpline, or working through the grant process?