Mental health support

A MENTAL health support agency is reaching out to provide help to the growing community in the Cardinia shire.
The Eastern Regional Mental Health Association provides support to people living with mental illness in the southeastern corridor of Melbourne.
The organisation is now providing services from a new office in Beaconsfield and recently began hosting workshops for carers.
Association chief executive officer Peter Waters said carers who looked after family members with a mental illness saved governments tens of thousands of dollars each year. His organisation delivers psychosocial rehabilitation services to people in Melbourne’s southeastern growth corridor of Casey, Cardinia and Greater Dandenong.
Mr Waters said the aim of the workshops was to assist the carers to ensure they could support and look after themselves as they cared for the person with a mental illness. He said the organisation already ran support groups for carers and the new workshops were delivered from Beaconsfield to meet the growing need for mental health services in Casey and Cardinia.
Mr Waters said it was hoped the free workshops would be able to be run three or four times a year. He said mental illness did not discriminate and could affect anyone of any background and often people trying to lead a normal life would have to live with it.
“People are often seen as a set of symptoms, rather than as a person with an illness. They are seen, for example, as a schizophrenic rather than a person living with a mental illness,” he said.
Mr Waters said one aim of the support provided by the association was to assist people who had had an episode of mental illness to engage with the community through work or employment.
The assocation also working to assist families who may have experienced a mental illness for the first time to link into and understand the different type of support services that are available to them.
For further information contact EHRMA on 9706 7388.