NEOLA, Iowa – For more than a decade, Harlan mother Devin Mahoney-Rold knew she needed help, but couldn’t find it through existing mental health and addiction recovery programs.
Thanks to a generous grant from philanthropist and former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott, NAMI Southwest Iowa will be able to expand its programs.
“I would call and say, ‘I need to go to detox or I need to go somewhere because I can’t stop drinking and I don’t want to die,'” Mahoney-Rold said from NAMI’s Neola office.
She struggled with addiction, but never linked it to other mental health issues. She just wanted help.
“I don’t want to keep ending up in jail and rehab and all this stuff,” said Mahoney-Rold, who has been in recovery for three years.
Like Devin, about 8.5 million adults in the US have both a mental illness and a substance use disorder. It’s often called “dual diagnosis”.
Anna Killpack is the local executive director of NAMI – the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She says treatment for people with a dual diagnosis is not one size fits all.
“Maybe that’s where we need to step back and say, ‘Okay, what can we do differently? Let’s, let’s not do the same thing over and over again, that’s not working,'” Killpack said.
The Southwest Iowa NAMI chapter applied for – and received – $100,000 of the money Scott awarded to NAMI nationally. The project is called ReConnect.
“We want families to understand the connection between mental health and substance use disorders,” Killpack said. “And for individuals to understand that so they can reconnect with themselves, reconnect with their families, and reconnect with recovery.”
Devin is now a peer leader.
“Everything that NAMI has to offer is free, and it’s run by trained peers; people who have been there.”
NAMI has chapters in Nebraska and Iowa, but only the Neola chapter has ReConnect.
Killpack expects good things from Scott’s national gift to NAMI: “I think we’re going to see a lot of new ways to help people.
