Understanding Your Mental Health Groups

This page will look at psychoeducation techniques that can be used as interventions by an occupational therapist when working with people with mental health conditions. These can be adapted to work with individuals or in group settings.
Read through the information and watch any videos below.
Ensure you scroll to the bottom of the page.

Understand your Mental Health

Working with people to understand their mental health can be very empowering. Often people want find reasons or causes for why their daily lives have been effected by their mental health condition(s). It is not always possible with mental health conditions to find a root cause, but working with individuals who wish to gain more understanding into their mental health can be a useful intervention.

One approach can helping individuals to think through all the factors which might influence their mental health is considering the stress vulnerability model often used with people with psychosis - but can be useful with a wide range of mental health conditions. This approach can be looked at in four areas.

Vulnerability factors
Life stressors
Risks
My protective factors

This can help with working towards a 'stay well plan

See the Sheet opposite which you can use with service users to help facilitate them to gain more awareness and understand of their mental health.

Understand early warning signs

What are early warning signs

Mental health is not static, it can change rapidly or more slowly for different individuals with different health needs. Usually there are some changes in the person in terms of subtle symptoms before perhaps more obvious symptoms emerge. These changes are called warning signs. By identify and acting on these early warning signs, relapse might be prevented or the severity reduced.

Identifying early warning signs and developing a plan to respond to these signs can be a helpful way forward and useful tool for an occupational therapist to build in to their intervention.

Activity

See the work sheets below, have go at scoring yourselves on the scale below to see how it is completed.

How did you find using the tool?
Could you use this tool to help you identify further intervention areas?

Create a stay well plan

A stay well plan can be used and adapted to be used with a people experience a wide range of mental health conditions.

It uses the idea that most people have a good idea of what supports their mental health (positive strategies) and what doesn't help their mental health (negative strategies).

This is a useful tool to use after identifying someone's early warning signs.

Negative Thoughts

Many people who experience poor mental health may at times experience negative thoughts. These can be debilitating and stop people from engaging in occupations which are meaningful to them. Using a psycho educational approach to understand why negative thought happen and how an individual can challenge them might be an intervention and occupational therapist will support an individual with.

Some ways to help people challenge their negative thinking is detailed below.

Some challenge to upsetting thought might be

What is the evidence to support these thoughts?
What is the evidence against these thoughts?

What are the alternative views?
How would someone else view this situation?
How would i have viewed this situation in the past?

What is the effect of thinking the way I do?
Does it help me or hinder me?

What thinking error am I making?
- All or nothing
- Catastrophising
- Personalising
- Jumping to conclusions
- Living by fixed rules

What action can I take?
What could I do to change my situation?

Hearing voices

Hearing voices is a more common experience than many think. It is important to remember that hearing voices is not necessarily a problems but rather the interpretation of the voices, the stigma associated with hearing voices, the impact they can have on completing activities of daily living and the distress the voices can cause.

An Occupational therapist might work along side an multi disciplinary team to help an individual explore different ways of coping with hearing voices

Learning more about your voices, understanding your own relationship with the voices
Identify unhelpful and helpful ways of coping
Challenge your beliefs about the power and the truthfulness of the voices
Normalise your experience by hearing about others people's experience of hearing voices (social networks)
Medication, what impact does this have on your voices

The picture is of a worksheet which an occupational therapist could use to work through with an individual to explore the relationship, perspectives and impact a persons voices might have on them.

Back to Psychoeducational Groups

Page updated

Report abuse