At the heart of wellness management and recovery is hope; if consumers do not feel as though the team believes in their full potential, it will be difficult for the team to serve as a catalyst for change.
Wellness Management and Recovery (WMR) interventions should be offered to all individuals receiving Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) as part of their core treatment. There are manualized applications of WMR, such as Illness Management and Recovery (IMR), Wellness Recovery Action Plans (WRAP), and facilitation of psychiatric advance directives. All team members are ideally adept at specific wellness interventions, including psychoeducation about mental illness and the stress-vulnerability model, building social support, recognizing signs of decompensation and averting crises, coaching to help clarify treatment preferences, coping with stress, symptom management, and getting needs met within the mental health system and community.
Leading the effort to deliver WMR is a trained peer support specialist on the team. A recovery-oriented peer specialist inspires hope and brings empathy and person-centeredness to their work. Peer specialists can also shape the team’s focus on recovery through advocacy. Optimally, peer specialists learn how to effectively balance being a fellow team member and a peer to those the team is serving. Peers come from a wide range of backgrounds and lived experiences. To effectively operate as a peer with individuals receiving ACT, the ACT peer specialist should be on their own path of recovery and have had symptom challenges similar to those receiving ACT services and significant life experiences, such as incarceration, homelessness, hospitalization, taking psychiatric medications, and/or general experiences of hopelessness and helplessness that come secondary to having a mental illness.
Learn More about the Wellness Management Services and the Role of the ACT Peer Support Specialist through these resources.
Suited for Individual Work
- Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP)*
- Action Planning for Prevention and Recovery (APPR)
- Pathways to Recovery
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Wellness in Eight Dimensions– will require supplemental material/work to meet TMACT criteria
Suited for Groups
- Illness/Wellness Management and Recovery (IMR/WMR)
- Enhanced Illness Management and Recovery (eIMR)*
- Wellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP)*
- Action Planning for Prevention and Recovery (APPR)
- Wellness Self-Management/PLUS (WSM)
- Pathways to Recovery
- Ending Self Stigma (ESS)
- Whole Health Action Management (WHAM)*
*Proprietary curriculum/require special facilitator training