WRAP


Wellness & Recovery Action Planning

WRAP is now the most widely used non-medical, recovery-based education programme in the world.

WRAP is not a theoretical programme – it is based in learning from experience – both the combined experiences of thousands of people who’ve taken the programe; and your personal learning from your own experience: what you know works for you.

Using this information you can “coach” yourself to stay well, and when you’re slipping you can coach yourself back to health.

Introduction to Recovery Including WRAP

The programme covers some important grounding ideas, lets you practice and build basic skills and offers an organising framework for your ideas about continuosly learning to live well – regardless of if you have a diagnosis.

Five Key Concepts

  • Hope
  • Education
  • Personal Responsibility / self determination
  • Self Advocacy
  • Support – receiving and giving

Five Plans in One

It also offers me a simple set of plans and tools for thinking about and organising what works, and what doesn’t work for me, based on my own experience  and observations.

1. Maintenence Plan

  • what I’m like when I’m well
  • my wellness toolbox
  • my daily maintenence plan

2.   My triggers

By learning to recognize and name my triggers I can give myselfves power over troubling situations. I can spot  what is happening  to me and value the response from my thoughts, emotions and body response. I  can practise ways to be more comfortable in the moment when I face challenges – and gradually learn to reassure and trust my when feeling triggered. I can build resillience and confidence and  become more able to deal with ever wider range of challenges.

3.   Early warning signs

We all have ups and downs, times when we’re not as well as we’d like.

We can learn to spot our own personal signs  – like symptoms, physical signs, or patterns of behaviours –  that we are not as well as we’d like to be. We can monitor our own health and when we see we’re becoming less well we can refocus, make a little extra time to take care of ourselves and do the things we need to do to stay well. We choose to focus on our daily maintenance plan and use one or two extra wellness tools – and bring ourselves back to balance.

4. When things are getting worse/ breaking down

Similar to warning signs but more serious – and needing more urgent attention and likely strong, effective support.

This is when I need to take direct action, right now, maybe take a break, ask for help from my supports and to make taking care of myself a high priority for a period. If I do this now I can get back to balance, my baseline.

Using parts  to 4 can help me stay well, avoid relapse and crisis – having these can help me not panic when I start to become unwell because I now have  more than one stage between well and in-crisis and I can catch myself. This way WRAP can help with relapse prevention.

5. Crisis Plan – advance directive

If and when I need it my crisis plan is a summary of the previous stages but also states the kind of support I would like should I become very unwell, like:

Who I’d like to help , what I’d like them to do, and what I’d like them not do do or say

  • Where I’d like to be taken, and not to be taken
  • Treatments and therapies that I find helpful, and those that make me worse or that I do not want.
  • Who I’d like to take decisions on my behalf
  • How to know when I’m coming out of crisis

Many people find simply having a crisis plan reassuring – so much so that the never need use it. If it does come into play it can result in crises that are less severe, shorter and less traumatic for me and my supports.

More about WRAP

WRAP is authored byMary Ellen Copeland

see…

http://www.mentalhealthrecovery.com/