Mental Illness
Mental illness can be debilitating and have widespread, serious effects on our life. I offer many courses targeting different aspects of the impact of mental illness and helping you cultivate a happy and healthy life. Please reach out to me for more information on any of the courses below.
Available Courses
Fictional Writing for Mental Illness.
Mental illness can be so consuming and effect us so much that it can seem like it's our entire world. It can be hard to see outside of the mental illness or to step out of the headspace created by the mental illness. This course is designed to help you remove yourself from the bubble of mental illness that you may be trapped in, through specific fictional writing, and allow you to see it from a different perspective. This, in turn, can help you identify stuck points, areas of change and new approaches to managing the mental illness you are struggling with.
Art for Mental Illness
Mental illness can often cause your brain to become stuck in the same thought patterns and perspective. By using art, which forces you to utilize different parts of your brain, this course aims to help you identify new thought patterns, develop new insights and perspectives and ultimately form new ways of managing your mental illness.
Forming healthy relationships
Mental illness often has a massive impact on our relationships with others. Whether it causes you to struggle in existing relationships or creating new relationships or has caused you to lose significant relationships in your life, this course can help you learn how to form and build relationships, strengthen existing relationships, grieve the loss of important past relationships, identify red flags in relationships and set healthy boundaries for yourself.
Advocating for Yourself
Mental illness can make everything harder, including advocating for yourself. But self-advocacy is also essential for people with mental illness to ensure that your needs are being met and you have the most supportive, healing environment possible. This course focuses on helping you overcome barriers and learn to advocate for yourself in a myriad of different situations so that you can get what you need to most effectively manage your mental illness.
Combatting Guilt and Shame
Guilt and shame have a way of festering inside us and slowly destroying us from the inside out. It can make managing your mental illness seem impossible. But rarely does that guilt and shame belong to you. This course focuses on helping you face the guilt and shame you feel and developing strategies to overcome it so that you may lead a life free from guilt and shame.
Moving Towards Independence
When you are battling mental illness you often need a lot of support and sometimes independence can seem daunting and next to impossible, no matter how much you want it. This course uses a variety of different techniques to help you identify the barriers and struggles that are stopping you from being able to be independent and works to overcome them so that you may move towards living a more independent life.
Non-Fiction Writing for Mental Illness
Writing utilizes different pathways in the brain and can help you understand your mental illness in a different way. This course not only aims to help you gain a different perspective on your mental illness, but to also then use that different perspective to find new, effective ways of managing it.
Work or school with mental illness
Mental illness creates unique challenges in both work and school. This course focuses on helping you identify those challenges and develop ways to overcome them so that you may succeed in the workplace or at school.
Coping Skills for Mental Illness
There are many good coping skills out there, some of which I am sure you already know. However, this course focuses on developing unique coping skills targeted at your specific situation. Whether it is a variation of a skill you already know, or developing completely new skills, you will leave this course with a toolbox of coping skills that work for YOU.
Transitioning from a Higher Level of Care
Sometimes when we struggle with mental illness we will need inpatient, residential, partial hospitalization or intensive outpatient treatment. These treatment programs can be invaluable but stepping down from one of these programs and back into the world can be jarring and difficult to navigate. This course is specially tailored to support you during this transition, help you readjust to living in the world, and combat any obstacles that may arise while you are transitioning. It also slowly tapers the support, so that you have the time to adjust to less support to make the transition as smooth as possible and give you the best chance at succeeding.
This is a custom package. Please contact me for more information and pricing.
Processing through Movies and TV
Often people struggling with mental illness will identify with particular TV shows, movies or fictional characters. The shows, movies and characters we identify with, or alternatively strongly do not identify with, can tell us a lot about our mental health journey, our needs, desires, struggles and dreams. This course helps you examine and process your mental illness and its effects on you through the TV shows, movies or characters that you identify with or have strong feelings towards.
Living with mental illness
Having a mental illness can be all consuming. It can feel as if your entire world, life and identity revolves around the mental illness. But this doesn't have to be the case. This comprehensive course combines elements of the other courses to help you work through problems, develop ways of managing your mental illness, gaining new perspective, developing goals and dreams for your future and discovering your identity outside of the mental illness.
This is a 3 month course.