Wellness Recovery Action Plan®

 

Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) was developed by a group of people who have experienced mental health challenges, in 1997. 

WRAP involves creating a plan that outlines what you need to do on a daily basis to maintain your mental health and well-being, as well as strategies to use when you’re not feeling well and is a tool to help people feel more in control of their own mental health, and recovery journey.

 

We deliver the Wellness Recovery Action Plan® course, in line with WRAP’s original values and ethics, our lead facilitators are trained and certified WRAP trainers.

‘WRAP courses enable you to create a snapshot of yourself at different points on the spectrum of well to unwell. You then formulate what you will need to do at these points using peer support & education from the course to build on & consolidate your existing strategies.’

-Uma, WRAP Co-facilitator

 

 

WRAP is used world-wide by people who are dealing with all kinds of health and life challenges and we run regular WRAP courses, which aims to help you to;

  • Help you stay as well as possible

  • Help you keeping track of difficult feelings and behaviors and developing action plans to help you feel better

  • Help you, in informing others of what to do if there are times when you’re not able to advocate for yourself

 

Each course is co-led by 2 or more trained facilitators who have their own WRAP plan and use it to support their own mental health and wellbeing.

Through the course they aim to facilitate spaces where information and knowledge is shared, creating a supportive space to enable you to think about what works for you.

The WRAP process supports you to identify the tools that keep you well and create action plans to put them into practice in your everyday life.  Along the way, WRAP helps you to think about what wellness and recovery mean for you, what is important to you and your live and then incorporate these concepts and tools into your plan and your life.

WRAP does not necessarily replace other treatments, however it is evidence based and has greatly improved the recovery and long term health of many people.

 

For more detail on the content of the course, please see: WRAP: Course information (Leaflet21)

For information about our 2-Day WRAP for staff, please see: 2-Day WRAP for Leeds health, care and community staff  

 

 

For more information on WRAP please visit: www.wellnessrecoveryactionplan.com

 

History of WRAP

 

 

WRAP was developed in 1997 by a group of people in Northern Vermont, USA.

The group all had experienced serious mental illness and we’re invited to attend a series of discussion meetings, led by Mary Ellen Copeland, who herself had been struggling with anxiety, depression and extreme mood swings- which had caused social isolation and hospitalisation.

Mary Ellen had begun her own journey after becoming disillusioned with treatment that focused on managing her illness rather than focusing on her return to health. She began to talk to people about the practical ways they managed difficult feelings and experiences and the strategies which they used to support themselves.  Mary Ellen identified five key concepts to this recovery; hope, personal responsibility, education, self-advocacy, and support —along with ‘tricks’ for feeling better, which would later be called wellness tools.

From research findings and within the discussion groups a simple system for organising a personal ‘wellness recovery action plan’ was developed.

For more than 20 years, people around the world have used WRAP to support their goals and help transform their lives. 

At the Leeds Recovery College we deliver the Wellness Recovery Action Plan® course, in line with WRAP’s original values and ethics. Our lead facilitators are trained and certified WRAP trainers.

 

 

 

 

WRAP Goals and values

WRAP is self-directed, and people choose whether to participate and  what they want to include in there plan.

WRAP is not a clinical tool, such as a treatment or safety plan. Those tools are useful at appropriate times – and having a WRAP plan can support them, but they are different from WRAP.

WRAP has the following goals;

  • To help people learn and implement key concepts for recovery into their day to day lives.
  • To support people to identify, and share personal goals for wellness.
  • To encourage people to identify the activities they use to help themselves feel better and organise these into a list of wellness tools (or strategies) that work for them.
  • To help people to consider their own personal stressors and triggers and to begin to develop plans for when they experience them.
  • To support people to develop a greater awareness of the personal signs and signals which may indicate a deterioration in wellbeing, and to make plans for these times.