NAMI 2007 Convention: Interview with Joyce Burland

Joyce Burland, Ph.D.

This is number three in a series of seven blogs made possible by the encouragement and financial support of The HealthCentral Network. All represent interviews with senior officers of NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] or other luminaries that attended the NAMI 2007 annual convention. They cover a wide range of topics that should be of interest to everyone that is involved in one fashion or another with mental health issues.

Joyce Burland, Ph.D. is the National Director of the Education, Training, and Peer Support Centers for NAMI. She is a clinical psychologist who worked for many years at a public mental health agency and had a private practice serving consumers and their families. Since joining NAMI in 2000, she has authored the NAMI Family-to-Family education curriculum (a free, 12-week peer education program for families) and the NAMI Provider-Education Program (a 10-week course training public agency line staff in skills of family-consumer-provider collaboration taught by a team of family members and consumers). Dr. Burland’s sister and daughter both have schizophrenia and her experience in coping with the disease in her own family deeply influenced her understanding of family trauma associated with mental illness.

RC: I’m both a consumer and a family member. My daughter has bipolar condition and suffers from severe anxiety, so I took the Family-to-Family course. It gives family members hope when they need it most.

JB: If anybody ever asked me, “Did you ever have one really good idea in your life”, I would say “Yes, I had one really good idea”. And that was I was going to trust family members to be teachers of other family members. So when you talk about all I’ve done, I’m very grateful. I think we’ve had 8,000 or 9,000 NAMI members who have taken this course, come to the training, and gone back to their communities to teach the course. So it really is their project.

RC: This course has had a positive impact on so many lives.

JB: People have asked me what caused all this activity. I really want to tell you it was a citizen protest. I could not believe in 1980, when my daughter became ill… that still nothing had changed [since the ‘60s when her sister had been diagnosed with schizophrenia]. Family blame was as prominent as it ever was 20 years before. Families were shut out of any kind of collaborative involvement with their desperately ill family member… I simply found it unacceptable that in the United States there was this kind of prejudice against a group of people who were stepping forward to say, “Help me be helpful”. We were told, “You are not helpful”. We thought that was absolute baloney. My daughter was gone, I think, in 7 days. Some of these schizophrenias just come on like tornadoes. You know it’s physical. You see the changes. And then somebody is telling you, “Your daughter’s infant psychosis is breaking.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding”. And that’s when I began to think, we have to do it. If they’re not going to help us, we need to help ourselves. We need to learn how to understand these illnesses. We have to see our family members as heroes, which we did not because the professionals did not. They were incurable in those days. It was all wrong. And I just protested. It wasn’t as much anger as it was outrage.