What is OIFA – and How Does it Fight Stigma in Arizona?

Have you ever heard of the Office of Individual and Family Affairs (OIFA)? OIFA promotes recovery, resiliency, and wellness for individuals with mental health and substance use challenges.

The OIFA team at BCBSAZ Health Choice strives to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health and substance use disorder – referred to as behavioral health.

“One of the main things we work on is stigma reduction,” OIFA Manager Veronica Welch said. “We want to normalize what Arizonans are going through because we know that, nationwide, one in four adults has a behavioral health diagnosis.”

The OIFA team members have lived experience themselves or with family members.

“Having lived and gone through some of the same experiences as the people we are serving, it helps us be supportive and better help them navigate the often-overwhelming system,” Welch continued. “We just bring a lot of compassion and drive to this work.”

OIFA meets with providers and members to distribute resources and connect members to services that will address their specific needs. But the work they do is for ALL Arizonans – not just BCBSAZ Health Choice members.

Our OIFA team partners with organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness and AZ Peer and Family Coalition to share information with the public on topics like stigma reduction. For example, OIFA recently teamed up with Acts of Kindness and gave them 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline refrigerator magnets and stickers to distribute to the elderly, homebound population they closely work with. Isolation and loneliness impact behavioral health and raising awareness about 988 – a free resource you can reach out to anonymously from the comfort of your home – can make a huge difference in the lives of older adults.

OIFA also hosts training courses. Whether they are going into Arizona high schools to teach ‘Adulting 101’ classes on topics like social and emotional stressors or working with local law enforcement to educate on the effects of opioid misuse or behavioral health medications – the OIFA team is always on the go and in the community!

“I did a training for our local law enforcement where I used an example of a hardworking father of four who got injured on the job and how taking prescription medication escalated into heroin use,” Welch explained. “At the end of the training, some officers came up to me and said, ‘You just made this real for us, this could happen to anyone.’ And that right there is how we start to reduce stigma and change lives.”

The OIFA motto is, ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ That means that Arizonans should be able to weigh in on behavioral health practices and policies that affect them. To provide opportunities for many different voices to be heard, OIFA has established committees open to everyone.

“We want our members, our community members, our peers, and family members to be on these committees because they bring the voice of experience – we’re always looking for people to join our committees!”

To sign up for a committee, visit Committees, Councils, and Meetings - BCBSAZ Health Choice (healthchoiceaz.com).

If you would like to help reduce behavioral health stigma in our state, take our Stigma-Free AZ pledge! All you have to do is fill out this quick form: azblue.com/stigmafreeaz.