Each year millions of Americans face the reality of living with a mental illness. During May, Northwest AHEC joins the national movement to raise awareness about mental health.

Now more than ever we need to find ways to stay connected with our community. No one should feel alone or without information, support and help they need. Mental health conditions are more common than you might realize — they affect about 20% of people living in the U.S.

There are a multitude of medications used to treat mental health. This lecture will review best practices from pharmacotherapy clinics for patients with mental health conditions.

Objectives
Identify treatment strategies for depression, anxiety and mood disorders, review drug interactions and common side effects of commonly used psychiatric drugs, and discuss the role of psychopharmaceuticals in practice.

Speaker: Julienne Kirk, PharmD, BCPS is a pharmacist and Clinical Pharmacist Practitioner. She has held a faculty position as Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine for the past 29 years. She teaches pharmacotherapy and psychopharmacology to family medicine residents. 

Read all about this upcoming program and register here!

Join us for this LIVE WEBINAR on May 11th, 8:30am-12:45pm. This 4 hour presentation will review concepts and programs for suicide prevention for children and adolescents. According to recent national data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), almost 32% of high school teens experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” and 17% reported having “serious suicidal thoughts” during the previous 12 months. Though only a small percentage of teens reported making a suicide attempt requiring medical intervention during the previous year (2.4%), undetected or untreated sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts can fester.

We hear the term health coach more and more these days so I wanted to explore the role of the health coach in this blog post. A health coach is a coach for people who want to or who are contemplating making behavioral changes that result in a healthier lifestyle. A health coach is a type of healthcare extender trained to help others set goals and be accountable for themselves as they begin a journey to improve their overall health and quality of life.