Our free annual Journey to Wellness Symposium will take place on Sat., Jan. 8, 2011 and feature several speakers discussing mental health issues. The first will be Susan Voglmaier, M.D., Ph.D. presenting a speech called “Lighting Up Brain Pathways:  New Ways of Understanding Mental Illness:”

Right now you are reading an article on a printed page. The patterns of the letters are flowing from your eyes to your brain, their shapes being processed by the thalamus and their meanings by the hippocampus, and a combination of information from these two centers is flowing to your pre-frontal cortex, so that…viola!  You know and understand what you have read.  If you have schizophrenia, however, this process may be jumbled.  Current theory has it that the thought disorder inherent in schizophrenia may be due to an imbalance in the signal transmission between these three parts of the brain.  This presentation will focus on Dr. Voglmaier’s study on helping to decode why and how to treat it. 

Emily Walsh, who suffers from depression, and Diane Kreisman, who has schizophrenia, speak about their illnesses.