How painting your life story can promote healing

A photo featuring text bubbles in various colors like orange, purple, and green surrounded by leaves. Examples of text include 'he loves me not.

Every Sunday for the last six weeks, Craig Morris has walked through Oakland streets populated by drug users to St. Mary’s Center, the shelter, soup kitchen and transitional housing provider that pulled him from the brink. There, Morris, who is 60 years old, painted a canvas as part of the Sacred Storytelling Art Project, a…

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Oakland 911 now can dispatch mental health calls to MACRO team instead of police

MACRO map

Oakland’s community response pilot program, which launched last spring as an alternative to a police response, was connected this month to 911 dispatch services. Teams with the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland program now will be dispatched to calls about mental health crises, wellness checks and other issues that trained professionals may be better…

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Kaiser mental health clinicians and patients protest long wait times

On Sunday afternoon, over 100 therapists, patients, and their supporters from across Northern California gathered in downtown Oakland to stage a vigil in front of Kaiser Permanente’s corporate office—one they said they’d run indefinitely until the corporation’s leadership takes big steps to make their clinicians’ jobs more sustainable and improve access to mental health care.…

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Comedians use humor to heal at Mental Health Comedy Hour

Woman holding poster board with rules for the show while Man points them out

Oakland comedian Kelly Anneken says she identifies as a “triple A”— alcoholic, anorexic and anxious.  “Stand-up comedy,” she said in a performance last week, “is everybody’s last resort before suicide or grad school.”  Suicide, of course, isn’t everybody’s idea of comedy, but Anneken’s audience, there for the Mental Health Comedy Hour, laughed. Founded earlier this year…

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