Chirlane McCray is passionate about mental health. The first lady of New York City openly discusses how mental illness has affected her own family, including diseases like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, PTSD and a relative who died by suicide. She brought that passion to her Oct. 19 lunchtime keynote at AHCJ’s Urban Health Journalism Workshop.
McCray founded ThriveNYC, a broad-based mental health initiative designed to reach deep into communities throughout the five boroughs and connect people with the counseling and services they need. But first, she told the room of journalists, you have to be able to push past the stigma and talk about it.
“We have to stop thinking about mental health in a silo, as a subset of physical health,” she said. Too many families still don’t know where to turn, and keep their problems hidden, as they try to protect the people they care about from judgment and shame.
[For more on this story by LIZ SEEGERT, go to https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2018/10/nycs-first-lady-urges-reporters-to-tackle-mental-health-issues/ ]
Photo credit: Kevin Hagen for The New York Times.
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