Earlier this year, flyers advertising NAMI Washington Coast appeared on notice boards across the county.
NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) is a nationwide program, and in Washington state, there are 20 local affiliates. NAMI Washington Coast is the local NAMI affiliate that serves Grays Harbor and Pacific Counties, and it’s being rebuilt.
And the rebuilding is timely. The Community Health Assessment (CHA) undertaken by Grays Harbor County Public Health found that access to mental health services ranked number one of the top three of pressing health concerns and as the greatest health education need in the community.
To learn more about NAMI, I spoke with Thomas Christian, a board member for NAMI Washington Coast while also balancing a full-time job with Columbia Bank. Christian credits Columbia Bank’s Connect Program for allowing him to serve the community.
What follows is our conversation edited for length and clarity.
TDW: Can you explain what NAMI is?
Christian: It’s the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It was started 75 years ago by moms who had children with mental health issues, and they were not getting any sort of support or information. They started this support group because all the ladies were dealing with different providers for their loved ones’ issues. They would meet and strategize on how to work with the providers because there were a lot of issues when there was no support system.
TDW: When did you become involved with NAMI?
Christian: It’s been five years now since I learned of NAMI. My adult child was checked in at the mental health facility at St. Peter Hospital in Lacey. NAMI was there giving a presentation for parents about what they can do for their children, and my wife looked at me and said, ‘We need to start going to this.’
I was pretty skeptical when I went into it because I felt completely alone and overwhelmed. I didn’t think a support group with other parents was going to be very valuable, but I kept going to their twice-a-month meetings.
Other parents, who were in much more serious situations than I was, started sharing and asking me whether I thought about this or do I know what gold standard testing is to get a good, accurate diagnosis of my adult child’s disabilities.
Through their group wisdom, they educated me and turned me on to resources that helped me grow in working with mental health issues. I’ve been with NAMI for about five years, and I’ve been leading NAMI meetings for about a year and a half.
TDW: What training do NAMI facilitators, such as yourself, go through?
Christian: You go through NAMI training program, which is two days of eight-hour trainings, where you go over real-life scripts, real-life situations, and talk about different mental health things and how to help be a good facilitator.
In a group that is run really well, the facilitator is doing the least amount of talking, and the group is helping each other. That’s where we want to be—the group helping the group, not a facilitator, acting like they have all the answers—because I don’t have all of the answers. What we found is you get a room of nine people with loved ones experiencing all different things, the amount of knowledge that you get when they start talking and sharing is amazing. It’s absolutely amazing.
TDW: How is a family support meeting structured?
Christian: NAMI programs are standardized. Everybody goes through the group guidelines and the principles of support, and then everybody does a two-minute check-in where attendees tell us what is going on today and how can we support them. We always run in pairs of facilitators so we have peer support for issues that can sometimes get very serious, very deep, and overwhelming. And having two people there for accountability purposes and safety purposes is hugely important.
All of our meetings are conducted with absolute confidentiality. If a person comes to our group and they break that confidentiality, they will be booted from the group.
All NAMI groups operate this way, and that’s critical. We really hold to an affinity of the NAMI model for how we provide peer support. You can attend a NAMI group anywhere in the United States over Zoom or in-person.
What I tell people is, having gone through it myself and having that feeling of loss and not knowing what to do and who to listen to and how to approach it, and then finally getting support from people who’ve really been there, they give you good practical advice for you to weigh.
I definitely want to be there for any parent who is struggling like that. If I can spend 10 minutes with them to help them start to map out their personal path of support for their loved one, I am all hands down to do it because that feeling of loss and being overwhelmed, it sucks.
And then people have shame. You wouldn’t believe the gambit that runs for people who have a loved one with mental health illness. Some family members say it’s bad genes and other people say it’s the mom’s fault or dad’s fault or the grandparents who caused it.
There is a lack of knowledge around mental health, and I was guilty of it myself, until you’re confronted with it and then you sit back and take a rational, reasonable, researched approach to educate yourself. I love to be there and help people look at things a different way.
One of the big things that we push is learning how to communicate with your loved one who has a disability.
TDW: How so?
Christian: When you’re dealing with someone with a mental health issue, their filter for understanding stuff is pre-skewed in an irrational way most of the time. If I get a group of people who have mental health issues together and ask, ‘How do you feel that your loved one talks to you?’ The number one thing that they say is, ‘Nobody listens to me and everybody tells me what to do.’
The truth of the matter is that while their perception isn’t inaccurate. The motives of the people talking to them is inaccurate, because their loved one is trying to help them, but the loved one is expecting them to process information in a rational way.
TDW: So you have to learn how to meet someone where they are, essentially.
Christian: We recommend a book by Xavier Amador called I’m Not Sick and I Don’t Need Help. Xavier has a PhD in psychiatry and all the things that he’s learned weren’t working when working with his own brother who was suffering from schizophrenia. He developed what’s called the LEAP method (Listen-Empathize-Agree-Partner). Listen and empathize with your loved one’s situation. Find something you can both agree on that is rational, reasonable, and doable, and once you identify what that is, partner with them to solve that problem
Why you go through the listen and empathize with your loved one is because that is how they’re going to feel heard; you didn’t just take what they say and try to solve the problem. You actually worked with them through all the irrational ideas that they have in a loving, caring way.
The LEAP method actually helped restore my relationship with my adult child because I didn’t know how to communicate with them. They have autism, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and super high anxiety and I had no idea how to properly handle that and communicate with them. And it was a skill I learned at NAMI from that book.
TDW: Has your adult children seen that you changed how you approach your relationship with them?
Christian: They have. If there’s an issue that they needs help with, they want to work with me because I use the LEAP method for communication, and by doing this, I’ve rebuilt the trust with them. They understand that dad will listen and work with them. I may not agree with some of their decisions, but they know that I’m not going to tell them, ‘You need to just get in line and figure it out.’
TDW: Have the family support meetings been well attended, being relatively new?
Christian: We’ve had two outstanding meetings. October’s meeting was phenomenal because we had a group of nine people, which is very large. The group participation and the issues that the group worked on were hugely impactful to the people who attended.
Every parent who has a loved one with a disability eventually goes through a sort of grieving process where all the hopes, dreams, and aspirations that they had for their son or daughter gets reassessed in light of their mental health issue.
And that’s a good and healthy thing. For myself, I didn’t realize how unachievable and unreasonable some of my expectations for my adult child were.
TDW: Currently, you offer a family support group meeting at Summit. Do you have other programming you want to offer?
Christian: We are looking to start a connection support group, which is for individuals who are living with a mental health illness and are trying to reach what we call recovery. They’ll never be over or completely fixed of their mental health illness, but if we can get them to recovery, which means that they have a safety net to help them, they have a provider who they’re working with, and that they are living a full life at whatever scale that looks like.
TDW: Any last thoughts to share?
Christian: If somebody needs help, come on out and see us. We’re going to be building groups and meeting the mental health needs and peer support to get people plugged into good professional services. And we’ll partner where we can, where it makes sense, and do our best to meet people’s needs. Ultimately, that’s what we’re there for, to meet the needs of the person who’s at the other end of the table with a group of people who are dealing with similar needs.
Post-script
Following the interview, Christian shared via email that looking ahead to 2026-2027, he is needing more new people trained to run NAMI support groups in Aberdeen, Copalis Beach, Pacific Beach, Queets, Neilton, Raymond, and Naselle. If there are people who live in these locations, who have a loved one with a mental illness, and want to learn how to run a NAMI Mental Illness Support Group, they should contact us.
All of the groups start out as a once-a-month support groups and as attendance grows, then those groups will shift to twice a month or more. What he tells new program leaders is you really can make a difference in helping people in your area work through mental illness challenges with their loved one.
In 2026, meetings will be held in Elma and McCleary. Visit https://www.namiwa.org/wacoast for the meeting times and locations, and to contact NAMI Washington Coast.
