In Our Own Voice presenters NAMI Columbia made In Our Own Voice (IOOV) presentations to over 1700 South Carolinians during 2009. Although Columbia had the only program in the state that year, South Carolina ranked tenth in the nation in total IOOV audience. This represented 76 individual presentations.

In Our Own Voice is a signature program of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness), the largest grassroots organization in the US devoted to mental illness. One of the chief goals of NAMI is to fight the stigma associated with mental illness. IOOV does this by having persons with a history of mental illness tell their stories to groups ranging from university classes to civic groups to mental health professionals and churches.

An In Our Own Voice Presentation is approximately one hour to an hour–and–a–half in length (depending on the available time of the audience) and features two persons telling their stories. These are accompanied by a DVD that features other persons telling brief vignettes of their experiences.

IOOV presentations are powerful stories tracing the speakers’ experience with mental illness from the Dark Days when their disease controlled their lives to the present when they have had dramatic successes and are able to entertain hopes and dreams for the future.

All presenters must pass a rigorous two–day class in which they build and practice their own presentations. As a consequence, the presentations are so professional that nearly everyone who has seen a presentation has rated their experience as both fascinating and enlightening. Many presentations have been obtained through references from other presentations.

In addition to fighting stigma by presenting to groups unaware of the face of mental illness, IOOV is also an effective training method for health care professionals, who tend to see the mentally ill only at certain times in the course of their disease.

Another major target is student groups of all kinds since students tend to be especially receptive to social justice issues. The organization has also made a special push to present to disenfranchised groups, e.g. the poor, homeless, and actively mentally ill, who gain hope by seeing others who have overcome handicaps not so different from their own. IOOV presentations are also therapeutic for the presenters themselves, who must often overcome their fears of “coming out” with their disease. Of course, there is no business or community group that would not find IOOV an important learning experience.

Columbia currently has more than 20 trained IOOV presenters, a number of whom who have made ten or more presentations. There are also plans to expand IOOV by beginning programs in other communities throughout the state.