OUR STORY  

Our organization is named after our son, Max Cochran, a young man who took his own life at the age of 19. Max was a beautiful, vibrant, loving person who “lit up” the entire room every time he walked into one. Unknown to many people, Max fought for many years to conquer his struggles with mental illness, and he was a very strong-willed person who tried many different ways to overcome his personal battles. In the end, life became more than he could endure. We, his family, battle daily the grief of his loss and try to understand why Max was hurting so much. Unfortunately, we will never fully understand.

During Max’s life, we battled many frustrations, and we learned several things about Mental Health care. One, there is not a good network available for young people, or any person for that matter, to receive help for Mental Health issues. We would call local Doctors and agencies and would be told, “We can see Max in 7 days”. We would reply that we needed help today, and tell them that Max is talking about harming himself. The answer would be, “If you feel that this is an emergency dial 911”. You can imagine the frustration that we felt.  We also learned that when we finally found a well-trained Mental Health counselor Max felt comfortable speaking with that this would help Max and give us all a feeling of hope. The things we learned from our experiences with Max hopefully will allow us to help other families who are dealing with the issues we have experienced. Therefore, we have created MAXimizing Mental Health, Inc.

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The reasons we created this organization:

*Keep Max’s memory alive.

*Bring awareness to the Mental Illness issues of our young people.

*Remove the stigma of Mental Illness in our community, especially for our youth.

*Put our energy used for Max in the past into something positive.

*Try to make a positive difference in someone’s life.

Goals for this organization:

* Bring awareness and remove the stigma of Mental Illness in our community, especially in our youth.

*Offer free Mental Health counseling to our community students.

*Make a positive difference in the lives of the youth in our community.

Help us to MAXimize the Mental Health of the Youth in our Community!!!

Please consider making a donation to our organization to help make a difference for our young people dealing with Mental Health issues!! All donations will go towards providing Mental Health counseling to those who can't afford the cost.

Please make all Tax Deductible donations payable to:

“MAXimizing Mental Health, Inc.”

616 Bellevue Drive, Gadsden, AL 35904.

You can also Donate online using this button: 

If you cannot make a monetary donation, ask us how to donate your TIME!

Contact us at email: dcochran@ua.edu    phone: (256) 490-6545