Mental Health Lessons I've Learned: The Key to Recovery is Engagement

It’s a thorny issue worthy of serious debate: how to both help and protect the civil rights of someone experiencing psychosis or delusional thinking. Often those who need help most, refuse it. In his book, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, Pete Earley describes his struggle to get help for his adult son, who developed a severe mental illness and was arrested.

On Sunday, February 28, the Science, Reason, & Religion Forum will welcome Pete to talk about the lessons he has learned from the time of his son’s acute illness through his recovery. These lessons include how to get someone to buy into his or her own treatment, as Pete has discovered through his own experience with his son that coercion doesn’t work.

A former Washington Post reporter, Pete is the author of 11 nonfiction books, including four New York Times bestsellers, and six novels. CRAZY, one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, has won awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Mental Health America, and prompted CNN to name him one of the nation’s top “Mental Wellness Warriors.”

Join us this Sunday, February 28 at 12:45pm at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, 2709 Hunter Mill Rd. in Oakton, VA. The event will be held in the UUCF Sanctuary Building. This is a free event and is open to the public.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax is a liberal religious community of more than 1,200 adults, youth and children dedicated to the free and responsible search for religious truth and meaning. The congregation’s mission is to “transform ourselves, our community and the world through acts of love and justice. For directions: https://uucf.org/directions/