Alumni - Alumni Updates
Alumni Updates:
- Barbara (Spiller) Currie ’62 says in a recent email: “I graduated in 1962 as Barbara Spiller and went directly to the University of Hawaii to get a MSW and spent about 35 years as a Clinical Social Worker, mostly in Southern California working with adults with serious mental illness and speciallizing at different times on Domestic Abuse, Incest, and Multiple Personality Disorders. In 1999 I decided to go to seminary and get a Masters of Divinity. I graduated from Andover Newton School of Theology in 2003 and accepted a call to a small rural United Church of Christ congregation in Deering, NH. I have enjoyed both my social work career and ministry so much and it all started at the University of Maine!” (Posted 5-16-11)
- Joshua Tuttle ’09 recently sent an email letting us know that he has received his MA degree from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Other good news is that he has been accepted into the PhD program at George Mason University. He plans to specialize in stratification and religion and will be working with Dr. Lester Kurtz. Congratulations to Josh!! (Posted 5-10-11)
- Golda Michelson ’69 is now a psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco and in San Rafael, Ca (Marin County). She lives about 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge in a beautiful area of Marin County. Email: goldamichelson@gmail.com
- Nancy Pizzo Boucher ’70 now lives in Westbrook, Maine. In 2009 she wrote a book called Getting My Night Vision. Here’s what she has to say about the journey that resulted in this book:
“In 1970 I graduated from the University of Maine at Orono with a degree in Sociology. As part of my study there, I went with one of my classes to visit the Bangor State Hospital. The suffering that I saw on so many people there was a memory that embedded itself in my consciousness. In 1994 my youngest son had his first psychotic break one month into his college education at Bard. Since he had graduated tenth in his class at Portland High School, he had received a four year scholarship to attend Bard at the price of his State University. By 2008 , fourteen years after he first got sick with a major mental illness, my son and our family finally found our footing again and are moving forward. In 2009, I wrote a book called Getting My Night Vision , of our family’s experience in learning to see the patterns of mental illness and bringing it out of the dark and into the light. My book is full of hope, practical matters, compassion, mothering and family. It is way past time for mental illness to come out of the darkness into the light, and I know that my book will help families as well as mental health treatment providers to move that process along. My husband and I are committed to do our part by getting 5001 books into the world to help break the stigma and isolation for families and for those suffering with mental illnesses. At the National NAMI conference in Washington, D.C. in July, I did a poster presentation titled Do Not Give Up Family. Our family helped promote healing and we know it can be done! My book is available online through Amazon and Barnes and Noble or directly through me.” Email: rcbou@maine.rr.com
