NAMI Linn County hosts annual mental health forum [Video]

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – The Linn County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, held its annual forum Saturday afternoon.

“Mental Health affects everybody. Whether it’s you, the person that you live with, it could be a parent, it could be a child, it could be a coworker,” said Allonda Pierce, president of NAMI Linn County.

The Linn County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness spent Saturday afternoon connecting resources in the community to people who could use them.

Nami’s president said the first step to do that is to change how people think about mental illness.

“People see people with a mental illness as something so negative or that there’s something utterly wrong with them, and they don’t want anybody to know because they don’t want people to start treating them differently,” Pierce said.

NAMI hosted a panel of speakers to share their …