Canadian Collaborative Mental Health Initiative

Toolkits for Consumers, Families and Caregivers

Working together towards recovery: Consumers, families, caregivers and providers

A team of experts (people who’ve experienced mental illness themselves, family members and caregivers) have come together to provide you with this toolkit so you won’t feel so alone. It is intended to offer you the information they wished they’d had right from the beginning.

Recovery from mental illness is the guiding light of this toolkit. Recovery is living life to the fullest – despite a mental illness. At first, recovery may seem like just too BIG of a mountain to climb – but it is really about finding hope and holding onto it.

The goals of Working together towards recovery are:

• To provide easy to find information you can trust so you and your family can be effective partners in your treatment and recovery.
• To make sure you know it is OK to ask that the professionals you see work as a team – if this would work best for you.
• To assure you that the most important members of the team are you and those who love you.
• To help you or your family become involved, if ready and interested, in creating a collaborative care initiative or other mental health service in your community.

Pathways to Healing: A Mental Health Guide for First Nations People

This toolkit is written for First Nation people regardless of where you live -- be it in an urban, rural, semi-isolated, or isolated setting

This toolkit will help First Nations people who are considering taking action to help themselves or others to heal:

• To make sense of their history and emotional pain caused by colonization.
• To help build self-awareness and understanding of how the past affects us as individuals, families and as a community.
• How traditional knowledge, ways of knowing, beliefs, values, language and cultural ways support renewal, healing and wellness.
• To begin to see how unspoken grief hurts our children, our young people and our ability to form healthy relationships as adults with our partners, as parents and with our elders. 

 

The toolkit provides practical advice on how to build supports and find competent and skilful help when the journey is difficult, and guides you to finding more information.

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