The Mindfulness Response: A Story of Hope

A Team Approach to Recovery: Building Community Supports

            The National Institute of Health (NIH 2015) recommended that people with serious mental illness symptoms work with a team of community healthcare professionals to find purpose and meaning and improve their lives. The team approach helps a person create goals and reach their potential. Living disease-free is something from the past. Realizing that mental illness is a disease, and requires daily attention to physical health, exercise, a balanced diet, proper sleep hygiene, and taking medications.

             Personal well-being involves a team approach. Providers who have different types of knowledge communicate and collaborate with the participants. Psychological Well-being is encouraged for everyone experiencing mental illness. Recovery is enhanced by managing symptoms over a lifetime.

            NIH emphasizes the importance of a team that includes psychiatry, primary care physicians, counselors, case managers, and other community providers the team helps the individual recover by addressing four areas of change:

Health—overcoming or managing one’s disease(s) or symptoms and making informed, healthy choices that support physical and emotional well-being.

Home—having a stable and safe place to live.

Purpose—conducting meaningful daily activities and having the independence, income, and resources to participate in society.

            The NIH made recommendations for optimized mental health that include:

Anti-psychotic medications: A collaborative relationship with provider

Psychosocial Treatment: CBT, Behavior Skills Training, Supported Employment, Cognitive Remediation: Resolving difficulties

Family Education & Support: Build understanding of serious mental illness.

Coordinated Specialty Care: Recovery-Oriented Treatment, First Episode Programs, Team Approach (psychotherapy, medications, case management, support for employment & education, family education)

ACT: Assertive Community Treatment: lower hospital admits; use of a multi-disciplinary team with outreach in the community, direct service, team approach, high-frequency contact

Treatment for drug & alcohol: This is offered if substance abuse is a problem.

Group therapy

            Trying to avoid stigma and shame causes participants to hide their symptoms and troubles. The dominant culture strives to be the best, do it on your own, achieve one goal after another, and then you can be successful. In the US culture, being independent, achieving goals, and doing it yourself are prized values (Hofstede, 1980, 2001, 2016).

            Group therapy participants experiencing serious mental illness (SMI) faced personal choices that interrupted their life plans and goals.  One participant talked about being in college for engineering when the psychotic episode started and how it interrupted a personal goal to graduate and get a job. Another participant talked about how PTSD and psychosis created havoc in a job and couldn’t focus and was on leave from the job due to trauma memories returning.

A Story of Hope

            The participants entered intensive outpatient therapy groups and were surrounded by a community of other participants who also had similar problems with SMI.  Through the healing experience of being part of a community or a village, they learned to build a supportive team of helpers to surround themselves and decide how to proceed in their lives.  Their goals were altered, but the experience of the village or community was invaluable. They learned that doing it alone and being independent is not the best advice for success in life. They re-evaluated their values and changed them with the help and support of the group.

            One parent commented that the family had given up hope of their young adult returning to college to finish a degree, but that the group therapy support had helped in so many ways.  The team of supportive providers helped the young adult to continue.  The parent stated: I was shocked that this could happen. I thought this would be the worst and there would be no more college classes, let alone a degree.