National Alliance on Mental Illness: Encyclopedia - National Alliance on Mental Illness

National Alliance on Mental Illness

NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, formerly known as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill is an American non-profit national advocacy organization founded in 1979 for people affected by serious mental illnesses and their families. NAMI claims to have over 200,000¹ members, offices in all 50 states, and 1200 affiliates across the United States.

NAMI is a grassroots organization that is run primarily by volunteers.

National Alliance on Mental Illness - Notes

• Note 1: Nami actually has 54,000 dues-paying members. Their policy is to take the actual number of members and multiply that by 2.8 because they believe this better represents "families" who make up NAMI. The remaining number of "members" are actually donors to the national office and national "professional members", a category of membership which no longer exists.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "National Alliance on Mental Illness", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki