Intro

Recovery is about recovering your wellness - WRAP stands for Wellness Recovery Action Plan. The Recovery and WRAP program consists of four components: core concepts, toolbox for feeling well, WRAP and recovery topics. The four components together can help you gain insight and control over your well-being on your own. WRAP's six action plans combine your insights into the activities you can do at different times to support your well-being.

Making a WRAP is not a quick task. Set aside time to reflect on each step, exchange ideas with fellow-WRAPPERS or people you connect with and feel free to start over, scratch and edit.

The longer you live with your WRAP, the better it will fit. It is a living document that you can always adapt to changes in your life, needs and, of course, your desires. You can choose a format for your WRAP that fits you best - Notion, a physical booklet, keychain, etc.

Origins of WRAP

The Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) was developed in 1997. Several dozen individuals who had experienced serious mental illnesses and were working hard to feel better and get on with their lives came together in northern Vermont, in the United States, for an eight-day gathering. Many attendees had been residents of state psychiatric hospitals at various periods in their lives. They came together to discuss practical strategies for regaining and sustaining their own wellness.

A key leader among those pioneers at the Vermont gathering was Mary Ellen Copeland, who was facilitating the discussion. Mary Ellen had been struggling with anxiety, depression, and extreme mood swings that caused social isolation, economic hardship, and repeated hospitalizations. Seeking to restore her health and reclaim her life, she’d become disillusioned with the psychiatric establishment of that time and its reliance on medication-focused treatment that prioritized managing her illness rather than focusing on her return to health. She began her journey to find strategies for recovery by conducting a survey of her peers on the subject. From the 125 responses she received, Mary Ellen identified five key concepts to recovery—hope, personal responsibility, education, self-advocacy, and support—along with “tricks” for feeling better, which would later be called wellness tools. She began to facilitate peer support groups, and, by 1997, her research and facilitation were generating widespread attention. She then received the invitation to lead the eight-day peer support retreat in Vermont that made history. The participants at the Vermont gathering drew on their personal experiences to identify what kinds of strategies worked for them to prevent emotional and mental breakdowns and maintain positive mental health. Read more here.

WRAP is a structured plan for self-management. The plan is not a treatment plan by social workers. You can discuss it with a counsellor if you wish and WRAP is sometimes facilitated by for example peer support - but the plan is and remains your own.

A short explanation on Recovery & WRAP

• Core concepts

  In a process of recovery of well-being, five core concepts almost always play a role. These are hope, personal responsibility, self-development, standing up for yourself and support. By considering what they mean to you, they can support a process of recovery from wellbeing. They provide a foundation for your own tools for feeling good.

• Toolbox for feeling good

  The toolbox is filled with things you know will help you feel good. It also and especially includes things you can do when things are not going so well. From all the ideas, tools, actions, that you collect in this, you can draw on for all parts of the WRAP itself.

• **WRAP, the six plans:**

With these six plans, you can organise and replenish your tools for feeling good.

• Daily maintenance The daily maintenance plan helps you find out and identify what you need to do every day to keep feeling good and plan your day so that you do those things. It also helps remind you of what you can do when you feel less well.
• Stressors ****These are events, circumstances, or situations that may lead to uncomfortable feelings or behaviors. Some people prefer the words “triggers” or “red flags.” Whatever you call these occurrences, when they happen they cause a normal reaction to the events in our lives—but if we don’t respond to them and deal with them, they can make us feel worse and disrupt our wellness. In this part of WRAP, we identify our stressors and the wellness tools we will use to respond if they occur.
• Early Warning Signs These are subtle signs of change that indicate we may need to take some action to keep our situation from worsening. Whereas stressors are things that happen around us, early warning signs are things we notice about ourselves or our environment that tell us we need to be proactive to protect or restore wellness. In this section, we identify our early warning signs and the wellness tools we will use to respond if we notice them.
• Signs That Things Are Breaking Down or Getting Much Worse When things are breaking down, we’re feeling worse and worse despite our best efforts. This is the time to take immediate action to prevent a crisis. In this section, we make a list of our signs that things are breaking down and the specific, concrete plan we will follow to use our wellness tools to help prevent a crisis.
• Crisis Plan If a crisis happens, it’s not your fault. The crisis plan helps you stay in control even when things feel out of control by making advance plans for yourself and for your supporters for what you need during this time. In this section, we define what a crisis looks like for our personal situation, who supports us, what supports we want and do not want, and how we want to be supported by others, including medical professionals if appropriate.
• Post-Crisisplan The post-crisis plan helps us navigate the period after a crisis so we can return to our daily plan on the timetable and in the way that makes sense for us. It also helps us evaluate our WRAP to identify new tools or strategies we want to use based on what we learned about ourselves through the crisis we experienced.
• Bonus: Topics on Recovery These are themes that delve a little deeper into aspects that may be involved in recovery of wellbeing. They can give you more insight into what supports you, what you want to develop or what you would like to change.