The experience of many people with mental health challenges shows that most such challenges are rooted in life experiences. Learning to prioritise and engage in healthy self-care can act as an accurate tool to support our recovery.

What is Self-Care?

Self-care is any activity that we do deliberately in order to take care of our own physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Download our document A Practical Tool for Mental Health Recovery to learn more about self-care.

Psychiatric Medication and Recovery Education

One of the main aims of recovery education is to support people with mental health difficulties to learn about and reflect upon their life experiences, their mental health difficulties and their recovery. We would encourage everyone to think deeply and openly about what might best support their recovery and the use of psychiatric medication may well be one of the elements of their recovery that they wish to explore. Many people have found that they eventually feel much better without medication, having found other ways to support their recovery.

However, it can be extremely dangerous to reduce or stop taking prescribed medication suddenly or without your doctor’s support. The body gets used to the medication and sudden withdrawal can be a shock to the system. Stopping taking medication abruptly can lead to distressing withdrawal symptoms and/or a relapse of the challenges they were originally prescribed for. Some people have described such experiences as ‘crashing’ whilst others have had to be admitted to hospital.

It is recommended that any reduction in medication is undertaken gradually over a period of time with the support of your doctor.

The Five Ways to Wellbeing are simple actions to practice each day to maintain or improve our mental health and wellbeing.

They are:

1. Connect,
2. Be Active,
3. Take Notice,
4. Keep Learning,
5. Give

Learn more at the link below.

https://www.mentalhealthireland.ie/five-ways-to-wellbeing/

At the Recovery College, we work within a framework called CHIME. Working within a framework ensures we bring the principles of recovery to the learning environment, and the effectiveness of what we do can be measured. This gives students reassurance that what we do is evidence based.

Learn more at the link below.

https://www.therecoveryplace.co.uk/chime-framework/