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HOW LOS ANGELES MAYOR KAREN BASS OFFERS WILDFIRES RESOURCES, NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS ... (301 hits)

For Immediate Release From Kingdom-Levine-Oliver Publisher, Inc.!


Firefighters from Mexico, Canada, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, are here, and our local, regional, and state partners have all stepped up to help. It’s all hands on deck to fight these fires. This is unity and partnership in action.


Wildfire Information & Resources

The City of Los Angeles continues to aggressively respond to the wildfires in L.A. Thousands of firefighters and first responders are working around the clock to save lives and protect property. Up-to-date information and resources are available here for those impacted by the emergency.

For life threatening emergencies and to report downed power lines, call 911.


WILDFIRE UPDATES & EVACUATION: https://lafd.org/news/palisades-fire-0

WILDFIRE RECOVERY RESOURCES: https://emergency.lacity.gov/recovery

SIGN UP FOR ALERTS: LA City's Emergency Alert System https://emergency.lacity.gov/alerts/notify...


Opening Wednesday, January 15

Disaster Recovery Center

Resources for individuals and families impacted by the Palisades Fire.

Open 7 days a week 9AM-8PM

10850 Pico Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90064


Online resources available at emergency.lacity.gov/recovery


For more emergency information,

@LAFD: Los Angeles Fire Department
@NotifyLA: L.A. Emergency Alerts
@ReadyLA: Emergency Management Department
@LACity: City of Los Angeles


FEMA Disaster Relief: https://www.fema.gov/about/offices/securit...


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ATTENTION:

N95 masks are available for the public at all LAPL locations while supplies last.
Visit lapl.org/branches for hours and updates.

Emergency information and resources can be found at lapl.org/be-ready.

Your mental health and well-being remain a top priority every day. If you need support in the New Year:

📞 Call or text 988 for immediate help from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
The NAMI HelpLine is also available for support and connection at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or .nami.org/helpline

You are never alone, and help is always just a call or text away. 💙


There has been an outpour of support of Angelenos wanting to donate resources to residents impacted by the wildfires.

To reach community needs, the City is announcing donation drop-off locations.
The following locations are based on the needs of impacted communities: See, https://www.facebook.com/MayorOfLA for a list of requested items such as diapers, non-perishable goods, bottled water or Gatorade, blankets, baby food, dog food, personal hygiene products, toiletries, air mattresses, microwaves, etc.


The National Weather Service has announced extreme fire danger will continue through Wednesday.

First responders and engines have been pre-deployed in areas close to the Palisades Fire and fire stations throughout the city.

Please prepare for extreme fire weather conditions: Ready.LACity.gov.
Stay informed and follow evacuation orders issued.


We’re launching a new, simple intake system to report price gouging — call 311 to report illegally hiked rents and prices. We have no tolerance for it. Price-Gouging during an emergency is illegal. Report Price-Gouging by dialing 311.

Angelenos are coming together to help each other through this crisis — it’s what we do.
THOUSANDS of volunteers are stepping up to help friends and families throughout the region who have lost everything. Find resources at lacity.gov

I’ve seen the devastation firsthand. These fires across our region have changed lives forever.

The days ahead will be challenging but we WILL get through this crisis, together.
Thank you to all the first responders who are working day and night doing everything possible to protect Los Angeles:
https://www.facebook.com/MayorOfLA/videos/...

It’s an all hands on deck effort as first responders continue to battle these fires.
Thank you firefighters, for your bravery and dedication during this emergency!


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For Immediate Release From NAMI!


The start of the new year can bring both feelings of excitement for new beginnings - but also anxiety for what the future will bring. Here are some helpful tips to help manage that anxiety.

Connection can also be a valuable tool for support. Your local NAMI is here for you with support groups, volunteer opportunities, events, and more to help connect you with your community. Find them at nami.org/findsupport


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Critical Things to Know About Emotions for Mental Health and Healing

"Perhaps the most important thing to know about emotions is that “emotions just are.” They can't necessarily be stopped or prevented. And there is a reason we can’t prevent core emotions from happening — emotions evolved to help us survive."
Here are a few things to know about emotions, mental health and healing:

Perhaps the most important thing to know about emotions is that “emotions just are.” They can't necessarily be stopped or prevented. And there is a reason we can’t prevent core emotions from happening — emotions evolved to help us survive.

The good news is that we absolutely have control over how we respond to our emotions, and we can do so in helpful ways that build and strengthen our mental and emotional health.

How Core Emotions Work
The core emotions we all experience include anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement and s*xual excitement. We often think of emotions as residing in our heads. While emotions are triggered in the brain’s limbic system, core emotions’ purpose is to activate the body. This happens via the Vagus nerve, which connects the brain to the body.

Each core emotion contains a specific program for action that causes certain sensations and impulses (again, hard-wired for survival). For example, fear makes the body want to run. Anger makes the body want to fight.

These impulses, especially when we aren't aware or in control of them, can drive unwanted behaviors, like yelling at a loved one for mistakenly hurting our feelings. Whether we are consciously aware of emotional impulses or not, they always exert a force for action. For example, when we are insulted, we may feel the impulse to cut-off the person who angered us, even if we are not aware that we are experiencing the core emotions of anger and sadness.

The ability to sense core emotions in the body has important ramifications for health, symptom relief, healing and transformation. And this is something we can learn with effort and practice.

The Impact of Inhibitory Emotions
Inhibitory emotions — like anxiety, guilt and shame — are another category of emotions that bury, squash and block core emotions. Inhibitory emotions suppress core emotions to keep us connected to others. For example, we will learn to push down our sadness or fear if we feel we will be judged for expressing those emotions. As a result, we might feel only anxiety without knowing we are experiencing other core emotions.

One of the most useful things about the Change Triangle, the tool I teach to the public and use to build and maintain my own mental health, is that it prompts us to use anxiety as a signal — not as a diagnosis. Anxiety is a signal that core emotions lie beneath, waiting to be named, honored and validated.

Many of us learned (unconsciously) to use guilt and shame to bury anger. As a result, we are no longer even aware that we are angry. We just end up feeling depressed from the emotions that have been turned inward. The emotional energy trapped in the body shuts us down. There are many costs from being cut-off from our core emotions: greater anxiety, depression and loneliness; low self-confidence and difficulty communicating our wants and needs; as well as physical symptoms including muscular tension, bowel problems, headaches and more.

Understanding Our Response to Emotions

Many people judge and blame others for “being emotional.” This happens for several reasons, first and foremost, because we don’t understand emotions and why we have them. And because anxiety and emotions are “contagious,” being with others who are experiencing core emotions may increase our own stress and discomfort. As a result, people sometimes react harshly. But with tools and understanding, we can respond in ways that help.

We can better understand the “contagion of emotions” by knowing that over 70% of emotional communication is non-verbal. We are wired to deeply react to each other's tones of voice, body postures and facial expressions. For example, no matter what words my mother says, if she looks angry, and has a harsh or judgmental tone of voice, I will have an emotional reaction.

Because we live in a society that doesn’t teach us healthy ways to validate and honor emotions, we default to pushing them away when they arise. We use defenses to avoid emotions, and those defenses are meant to protect us from emotional discomfort.

Defenses are brilliant adaptations designed to help us survive painful experiences. It doesn’t help to think of them as bad. Rather it is important to understand that habitually using defenses costs us our vitality and authenticity. It’s in our benefit to use defenses sparingly. For example, I may push down my sadness or anger at work so I don’t cry or yell at my boss. But later, I should make time to tend to my sadness and anger, so I don’t bury these emotions in my body.

The Benefits of Fully Understanding Emotions

Processing core emotions instead of burying them or blocking them with defenses and inhibitory emotions is important because the energy that core emotions creates needs releasing — not to stay stuck in our body. Ideally, we spend our emotional energy on engagement with the outside world, like meaningful work, activities and connection with other people, not on maintaining defenses that hold our emotions down.

By learning about emotions and building a relationship with our own, we start a healing process. For example, noticing emotions connects the brain, mind and body, which leads to greater calm, confidence, mental flexibility and better health.

Ultimately, knowledge dispels many of the dangerous myths we learn, like “emotions are weak,” and we should be able to “just get over it.” Teaching people they are weak for their emotions, or that it’s possible to exert “mind over matter” to stop emotions, has grave consequences for our mental health.

It’s not our fault that we don’t always understand emotions — how would we if no one has taught us? But it is within our control to learn all we can for healing and prevention of symptoms like anxiety and depression. Healing the mind is possible under the right conditions and that can start with understanding our emotions.

Learn more HERE!: https://www.nami.org/anxiety-disorders/cri...


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From Isolation to Community and Change

Getting Involved with NAMI

I didn’t find NAMI; it found me. In the early 1990s, Rona Purdy, a NAMI board member, heard about a lecture I gave to medical students at Harvard Medical School comparing my dad’s experience of a life-threatening mental illness to my own experience of having cancer as a resident.

I asked the students to help me understand how I was a hero for having survived a difficult medical illness and he was a pariah for having survived a difficult mental illness. I apparently had a “respectable” illness and he had an undesirable one. I received casseroles and “You are a hero!” sentiments. He got isolation at all turns. Of course, medically there was no real difference: Both of us could have died without good care and family support. Yet I also knew that society has not always been well-informed about or accepting of cancer as a treatable illness, and this gave me hope for the future and changing attitudes about mental illness.

Shortly after my lecture, Purdy flew to Boston and taught me all about NAMI. I began to volunteer at NAMI almost immediately. I realized that day we had lunch that I was home for the first time in my professional life. And thanks to NAMI, I was able to tell this exact story of injustice to Congress at mental health parity hearings.

Working with My Community

NAMI has moved mountains in these four decades. Mental health parity is among the greatest pieces of legislation in the entire field of health care — although it still has a way to go. There are almost 300 early psychosis treatment centers across America, thanks in large part to NAMI’s advocacy and clarity of purpose. NAMI Family-to-Family has helped hundreds of thousands of people with mental illness and their family members. NAMI Basics and Homefront both have peer-reviewed evidence to support their efficacy.

I was recently at NAMI Mercer County in New Jersey and they were collaborating with a local school on a suicide crisis, using Ending the Silence as a key tool. The list of NAMI accomplishments is what pathologists might call TNTC: too numerous to count.

However, NAMI’s work is never done. The forces of discrimination, prejudice and unequal access to care are mountains we have yet to fully climb. The complexity of the brain and the challenges it poses to the development of better treatments is humbling. What’s different, though, is that the lonely kid in me knows we will climb these mountains together.

Read the full article HERE!: https://www.nami.org/education/from-isolat...


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NAMI Ask the Expert welcomes Dr. Gail Daumit who will review evidence demonstrating the impact physical health — good and bad — has on people with mental health conditions.

She will both provide background on the science and studies behind the interventions and also practical strategies for people to use in their own lives and for clinicians to use in their daily work. Dr. Daumit’s research spans all heart disease risk factors, and she will address diet, physical activity, weight, tobacco smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol in her talk. Leave with tools you can use for yourself, family members, people in your community and those for whom they provide services.

After the presentation, NAMI’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ken Duckworth will moderate a Q&A session. This session will be recorded and posted to our website one or two days after the webinar. A typed transcription of the audio will also be provided within one week of the webinar.

Dr. Gail Daumit, M.D., MHS

Dr. Gail Daumit, M.D., MHS, is the Vice Dean for Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is the Samsung Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has joint appointments in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She is director of Johns Hopkins NIMH ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness. After attending college at the University of Pennsylvania and medical school at Emory University as a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar, Dr. Daumit completed internal medicine primary care residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. She then came to Johns Hopkins, participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and General Internal Medicine fellowship and joining the faculty in 1999.

Dr. Daumit is a practicing general internist, epidemiologist and mental health services researcher whose work is devoted to improving physical health and decreasing premature mortality for persons living with serious mental illnesses. Dr. Daumit has obtained continuous NIH funding for this work since 2000, including 12 investigator-initiated grants. Her current projects — the ALACRITY Center and a newly funded NIH project named DECIPHeR— focus on testing implementation strategies to scale up evidence-based interventions to decrease cardiovascular risk for persons with serious mental illness in community mental health settings. For this work, she partners with community mental health organizations and a broad range of stakeholders.

Dr. Daumit’s clinical trial of a behavioral weight loss intervention for persons with serious mental illness, the ACHIEVE trial, was the first long-term clinical trial to demonstrate that a behavioral weight loss intervention was successful in persons with serious mental illness. ACHIEVE won the Society for Clinical Trials of the Year in 2014. Dr. Daumit also served on the World Health Organization Guideline Development Group for Identification and Management of Physical Health Conditions in People with Severe Mental Disorders. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Daumit was awarded the Department of Medicine David M. Levine Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2018. She has mentored more than 25 junior investigators and has authored more than 90 publications.

Learn more HERE!: https://www.nami.org/namis-ask-the-expert/...


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NAMI Ask the Expert welcomes Dr. Gail Daumit who will review evidence demonstrating the impact physical health — good and bad — has on people with mental health conditions.

She will both provide background on the science and studies behind the interventions and also practical strategies for people to use in their own lives and for clinicians to use in their daily work. Dr. Daumit’s research spans all heart disease risk factors, and she will address diet, physical activity, weight, tobacco smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol in her talk. Leave with tools you can use for yourself, family members, people in your community and those for whom they provide services.

After the presentation, NAMI’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ken Duckworth will moderate a Q&A session. This session will be recorded and posted to our website one or two days after the webinar. A typed transcription of the audio will also be provided within one week of the webinar.

Learn more HERE!: https://www.nami.org/namis-ask-the-expert/...


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Exploring the Connection Between Trauma Healing and Physical Health

An estimated 20,000 research studies have been done on the impact of stress on the human body. According to the medical experts, no one study definitively proves that unresolved childhood stress and trauma can cause physical illness. However, my personal experience has led me to believe that it does.

I am not a medical professional, nor am I a therapist or nurse. What I am is a professional patient who has battled a lifetime of illnesses, from Type 1 diabetes and high blood pressure to Graves’ disease and stage IV colon cancer (twice).

I believe my complex medical history is connected to the s*xual abuse I experienced in my childhood. Exploring this connection has been a key component of learning how to heal from trauma.

Facing the Impact of Childhood Trauma
Typically, one of the first lessons children learn is the importance of telling the truth. For children who have experienced physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological trauma, this lesson becomes confusing and stressful. Frequently threatened and told to lie, children like me are led further and further away from a core value: The authenticity to speak directly from the soul.

The result is often a spiritual loss so deep that recovery from stress and trauma can feel impossible.

Late one night, during a hospital stay for surgery to remove two feet of my colon, I knew I was dying. It was in that moment that I vowed, if I woke up the next morning, I would teach my body, mind and spirit how to heal.

Accepting What Happened to Me Was Not My Fault

My journey to healing required an emotional reset. I had physically survived the trauma, but my emotional wounds remained. I was always sad, hurt and angry because of the years of emotional issues and suffering I endured. I wanted a person to blame and hold responsible for my pain. I wanted the individuals responsible for the abuse to apologize; but I learned amends rarely happen.

The healing journey is also complicated by the constant reinforcement of victim-blaming attitudes (by peers, courts and media) that validate what perpetrators have been saying all along — that the abuse was the victim’s fault. Part of my process involved learning and accepting that abuse is neither the victim’s fault nor their responsibility; responsibility lies solely with the perpetrator.

Read the full article HERE!: https://www.nami.org/complimentary-health-...


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Your mental health matters, and we’re here to help. The NAMI Teen & Young Adult (T&YA) HelpLine offers a direct connection with another young person who shares similar experiences and is prepared to offer information, resources, and support to help you move through difficult times to a better place.

Available Monday-Friday, 10:00 AM - 10:00 PM ET, just text "Friend" to 62640, email helpline@nami.org, or visit nami.org/talktous to connect


VISIT: nami.org VISIT: nami.org VISIT: nami.org VISIT: nami.org VISIT: nami.org

PLEASE SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS IN CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES REGIONS.

















Posted By: agnes levine
Monday, January 13th 2025 at 3:47PM
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