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KEYS Region Mental Health Task Force

History: The MHTF was initiated by the Health Work Group at the 2001annual community forum put on by the Community Wellness Coalition. Sally Andre was especially dedicated to starting this Task Force. The group has met monthly, September thru June, since then.

Goals: At the June 2006 meeting, goals for Sept. 2006- June 2007 were brainstormed, resulting in the following list (the results were clustered and combined):

• Awareness, Networking
• Resource sharing
• For information sharing, consider a Listserve, maybe set one up on yahoogroups.com that everyone can use to share their news
• Consider meeting less often
• Presentations on services, programs such as AA, Rotary, Judge, Attorney, What families are going through, Fair Tide, York Co. Shelters, Table of Plenty, Schools
• New Initiatives like Civilian Police Academy and Mental Health Court in Augusta (Nancy Mills)
• Quarterly presentations on statistics, numbers served by the larger agencies (CSI, Sweetser, Seacoast MH, etc.) How to measure progress on goals?
• Be a pollination center
• Be advocates in the community, stigma reduction
• Look at accomplishments
• NAMI information needs to get out there, be passed out by all the agencies
• What do we have to do to get more people taking a stand for people with mental illness?
• More psychiatrists who stay (one person has seen 4 psychiatrists in 6 months due to turnover)
• More education
• More support for men, and for teens
• Peer to peer support
• Help those who are hurting, let them know we care
• Do some visits to other sites again; it was challenging, but worthwhile last year to see other places; need to be sure the arrangements are made ahead of time. (Sweetser offered their new meeting room.)
• Case studies are too risky re confidentiality. Informative, but this isn’t the right setting for them, with an open meeting format.

Meeting minutes: a full set is available by emailing info@keysregion.org but a few recent sets are linked here:

November 2006 (Webpage)

December 2006 (Word download)

January 2007 (Word download)

February 2007 (pdf)

March 2007 (meeting cancelled)

April 2007 (webpage)