Caramore's mission

Caramore’s mission—written at the top right of this page—is to aid those suffering from psychiatric diseases.

Our mission and services are centered on providing a response to mental illness. This blog has stated our medical, rehabilitative, and ongoing illness management responses to the illness—responses that are at the same time scientific, ethical, and practical.

But there is another vital response needed—that of battling stigma. Slow realization, agreement, and acceptance of all that can go wrong with the complex brain; and the natural bewilderment of trying to understand distorted behavior altered by brain diseases, add up to a society that at best doesn’t understand, and at worst feels extreme discomfort.

Certainly the illness deserves anxiety—considering that we’re all vulnerable to depression and anxiety just as we are to heart disease and cancer. As we pass from youth into adulthood, limits to our healthy functioning begin to make themselves known. Our own imperfections, misfortunes, and limited suffering awake in us the realization that many others are suffering.

And to have a mental illness is to suffer—as millions do. But then to be marginalized and shunned by a confused and uncomfortable society, simply for having a hereditary illness—well, it doesn’t get any worse than that.

Caramore’s response to this is to be an organization based on inclusion. We believe that the most important first step in reversing society’s uneasiness—is to show them how easy it is. Caramore’s “community” is one in which having a mental illness does not mean exclusion or limitation. We seek to embrace, incorporate and include. Through camaraderie, relationships, expectations, and opportunity, we seek to not only pull people out of a debilitating illness, but show the obvious: we’re dealing with ordinary yet capable people who have a treatable disease.

A growing number of our clients—because of performance, attitude and effort—go on to work for us in permanent positions. These merit-based achievements we talk up precisely because we believe they are an example of our mission—to change society’s perception of mental illness.
D.Cooley