Friday, May 18, 2012

Shrink Rap Ads for NAMIWalks Donations

Click image to Donate.

Shrink Rap is walking for NAMI's Donation Walk tomorrow, Saturday May 19, at Baltimore's Inner Harbor (Rash Field), at 11am. Looks like medical blogger, Dr Val Jones, will also be joining us. Roy and Dinah will be there (I think Dinah; she said she might). Clink will not be able to join us.

But, as you can see on the left, we have only hit 21% of our goal. Sure, it's $300 more than last year and I probably over-reached, but I'm not giving up yet.

Here's the deal. If anyone donates at least $200, we will donate one week of advertising on Shrink Rap, right in the header where the lime green ribbon is now. That's about 8000-10,000 pageviews and potentially 300+ click-throughs. (No pharma, no distasteful ads. Sorry if this seems cheesy but it's for a good cause.)

And, if you are in town, feel free to join us Saturday morning. Registration begins at 10am. Thank you.

(Also, thank you to our recent contributors: Lawrence, Dave, Julie, Dinah, Elise, Carol, Elizabeth, Amy, John, Colleen, Michael, Valeria, and several Anon's.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, my...there are super-smart people out there with psychiatric illnesses, (hmmm John Nash, Edgar Allen Poe, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway) and there are certainly brilliant people who take an SSRI.

Shrinks and mental illness...nothing to indicate that psychiatrists have a lower incidence of psychiatric disorders than others...I would imagine it is the same as the general population or higher-- people certainly get interested in problems they've experienced or problems they've seen family members experience.

It's a very individual thing for both the doc and the patient in terms of self-disclosure (I've blogged on this before). A shrink might feel that it normalizes/destigmatizes/makes it seem not so horrible to know that the doc has tried a psychotropic. Obviously, in these cases, it was the wrong thing to disclose because it shook your confidence. In general, I agree that the treatment is about the patient, not the doc, and the doctor should not disclose their own mental health history.

Anonymous said...

Roy,

With all due respect, as long as NAMI generally emphasizes meds as the primary treatment for mental illness in spite of questionable efficacy long term, I suspect you will have a hard time reaching your fundraising goal.

Just so people know I am not slamming NAMI, I think there are many enlightened members in the organization. In fact, the LA Branch invited Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, to speak in April.

Also, I realize that mental illness isn't the most popular topic so that could be another reason why you are having fund raising difficulties. But in my opinion, until NAMI changes the perception that it thinks that drugs are the only answer to all problems with mental illness, you will continue to have problems meeting your fundraising goals.

AA