Karen Shein, CRC is an intern at Ashwood Recovery and the Vice President on the board of directors for NAMI. Her work with NAMI started in San Diego where she started out leading groups and served as the business education manager. Karen describes the mission of the National Alliance on Mental Illness(NAMI) as ending the stigma around mental health.

I’ve been meaning to do an interview as a part of this blog for awhile now but was honestly super intimidated about the process. When I sat down with Karen Shein I initially was just looking for some more information on how to get involved with NAMI but our meeting went so well and I was able to learn so much from her that I decided to finally write up an interview.

Karen became passionate about mental health when a family member was diagnosed. Through doing her own research on how to help she became more aware that there’s still a lot of stigma around mental health issues and she wanted to be a part of the solution. She describes how in different cultures people in psychosis are looked up to or seen as just having a different perspective.

It wasn’t until later in life that Karen discovered that she had mental health issues herself. She was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Once she got on medication she thought, Oh, so this is how most people feel all of the time!

In wanting to expand her knowledge Karen went to school to become a counselor. She started taking classes at San Diego State University which led to her eventually lecturing there herself

Eventually she found addiction to be the next logical step since there are so many people with co-occurring mental health and addiction issues. She is still taking on many opportunities to learn as much as possible about mental health and addiction issues.

Today she is finishing up her M.S. in psychiatric rehabilitation counseling and working towards her LCPC (Idaho) license, having just moved to Boise this summer. She is trained in motivational interviewing, suicide prevention, trauma-informed care, vocational rehabilitation, has received recovery model training as well as having facilitated the Family-to-Family, Ending the Silence and Family Support NAMI groups.

Locally, NAMI currently offers a peer support program and a family support group. You can look forward to a number of upcoming groups including a Family-to-Family course in March and a NAMI Basics course in April.

To learn more about NAMI or to add your name to the waitlist for some of the upcoming local groups visit: https://www.nami.org/

Or for more resources contact the NAMI Helpline:

Monday-Friday 8am-4pm(MT)
1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or info@nami.org

This is not a crisis hotline. If in crisis please either:

Text NAMI to 741-741 to connect to a crisis trained counselor 24/7 via text message

Or

Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1(800)273-TALK (8255) 24/7 to talk to a trained crisis counselor.