NAMI NKY supports families dealing with mental illness

Like all volunteers at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Inc. of Northern Kentucky, Executive Director Kathy Keller says she’s walked in the shoes of those she’s currently helping. 

“There’s quite a bit of mental illness in my family,” says Keller, who first became involved with NAMI when she took the organizations’ Family-to-Family Education Course in 2003. 

She’s been teaching the class since 2004, and NAMI NKY is currently offering it again, which Keller says is critical because it enables loved ones to learn how to communicate with one another in a more constructive way. 

“It certainly teaches one a lot of basics about what’s going on in the brain—a lot of basics about the illnesses and a lot of things about medication, but that’s sort of the steps you have to take to get to the first landing,” Keller says. “Beyond that, it is all about self-care and communication. Self-care is very important because when someone in the family has a mental illness, the whole family gets sick along with them because their behaviors are out of the norm, and it’s very difficult to sometimes communicate with them, sometimes to get them to take medication or even to understand they’re ill.”

According to Keller, the behaviors are uncomfortable, so in order to help relatives and friends learn to not take things personally and to be more empathetic, NAMI NKY operates on nearly an entirely volunteer-run basis to offer everything from classes and support groups to social outings for those in need. 

“I see it everyday—a huge population of our mentally ill are in jails or prisons, and often, their families have either abandoned them or they have abandoned their families because of lack of understanding or lack of ability to communicate,” Keller says. “Families can just take so much and then they kind of wring their hands and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’” 

While Keller doesn’t claim that courses like Family-to-Family keep people out of prison, she does claim that it keeps family ties in tact. 

“This course really does change the lives of the people who take it,” Keller says. “It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, I can do this—I see there’s a way to do this. I’ve talked to other people who’ve been through it, and I see other alternatives of how I can deal with my ill relative.’”