The NAMI National Convention, July 6–9 in Denver, is the largest national gathering of mental health advocates in the U.S. The convention educates, encourages and empowers a diverse community that is passionate about building better lives for people affected by mental illness. This year’s theme is: “ACT. ADVOCATE. ACHIEVE.”

Register by March 31 and receive the special Super Saver rate of $215.

Program offerings at the NAMI National Convention

NAMI California has an outstanding selection of policy and education sessions, research updates, an advancing recovery program track, workshops and more. Learn more about the convention program offerings.

One research session by Paul Grant will be presented as part of the advancing recovery through new research program track scheduled for July 6 at the NAMI National Convention 2016, Denver.

“… In the late 1990’s, we decided to see if we could understand negative symptoms better and find a way to improve them. The prevailing belief in the field has been that the observed social withdrawal and inactivity is based on impairment of brain function, specifically, of attention, memory, and executive function. However, we could not fathom how these particular impairments could translate into the profound inactivity we saw in the person staring at the wall. This led us to conduct many interviews with individuals experiencing negative symptoms.
We came to a startling conclusion: these individuals appeared to have a system of negative beliefs that could account for their low functioning…”