March Meeting Tonight: Nami South Bay is starting an “Ask the Doctor” Series about the different types of mental illness using Zoom until meetings can once again be held in person. Dr. Benjamin Furst will be presenting to start the series. Dr. Furst has been a teaching psychiatrist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and faculty member at UCLA for the better part of the past 15 years. He currently serves as an attending psychiatrist in the adult outpatient clinic at Harbor-UCLA, where he has also worked in acute inpatient and emergency room settings. In additional to clinical work, he teaches and supervises psychiatry residents and medical student rotators and has participated in the conduct of clinical trials in mood disorders, schizophrenia, and substance-use disorder.
The meeting will begin at 7:30 p.m. (Monday, March 15, 2021)
We will be providing presentation on the other types of mental illness in this “Ask the Doctor” format in future meetings thanks to the assistance of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center School of Psychiatry.
NAMI South Bay August Membership Meeting
From the Friends of the Semel Institute: Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby play a pair of New Yorkers who both live with bipolar disorder in Paul Dalio’s debut film, Mania Days. The couple meet in a psychiatric hospital and begin a romance that brings out all of the beauty and horror of their condition.
In the new, award-winning movie, Infinitely Polar Bear, Mark Ruffalo plays a father whose bipolar condition affects all or most of his life, from an inability to keep a steady job to bold wardrobe choices. Of his character, Ruffalo says he has “one foot on the banana peel and the other on the grave.” It a “real tightrope act.” Ruffalo, 47, had little difficulty accessing the character. He says manic depression “runs in the family,” and that he has personally suffered occasional bouts of depression. 
NAMI South Bay 