Mental health recovery can be long and challenging, but it’s important to persevere through the process. Remember that improving your mental health and well-being will help you live a more full, happier life.
Understanding the stages and strategies of mental health recovery can help patients reach long-term recovery more efficiently. Here are the stages of mental health recovery so that you can work toward improving your mental wellness.
Stage 1: Accepting You Need Help
Mental health recovery starts with getting care immediately when you notice symptoms and not waiting to see if they will go away on their own. Allowing symptoms to continue can cause stress and affect your goals, relationships and daily functioning.
Common symptoms of mental health disorders include:
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- Excessive worrying or fear
- Feeling excessively low or sad
- Extreme mood changes
- Strong feelings of irritability or anger
- Avoiding friends and social activities
- Changes in sleeping habits or feeling tired and low energy
- Changes in eating habits such as increased hunger or loss of appetite
- Overuse of substances like alcohol and drugs
If you notice these kinds of negative changes in your thoughts, behaviors or moods, you may have a mental health disorder. Common mental health disorders include:
- Major Depressive Disorder (Mood Disorders): impacts a person’s mood, cognition and behavior. Other types of mood disorders include bipolar disorder and postpartum depression.
- Anxiety Disorders: individuals experience irrational fear and avoidance of certain objects, people or situations that pose little or no danger.
- PTSD: individuals experience a heightened, prolonged stress response and spend long periods of time dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic event.
- Personality Disorders: individuals experience a way of thinking, feeling, and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time.
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: individuals experience obsessive thoughts and urges, or compulsive, repetitive behaviors.
Stage 2: Finding the Right Level of Care
Choosing the best level of care for you will depend on the type of care you need, the severity of your mental health condition and your treatment plan. Depending on your mental health needs, you may need to receive long-term residential psychiatric care, acute inpatient psychiatric care, subacute inpatient mental health care or outpatient therapy sessions.
- Long-term residential psychiatric care: Long-term residential psychiatric care is meant for individuals who require a higher level of care and are experiencing severe symptoms like self-harm or self-destructive behaviors, substance abuse and severe mood changes. This kind of care often lasts significantly longer than traditional inpatient psychiatric care. It’s a dedicated space for ongoing mental health treatment in a residential setting.
- Acute inpatient psychiatric care: Acute inpatient psychiatric care is designed for those experiencing a severe crisis or are in immediate danger of hurting themselves or others. This kind of care is provided in a locked, secure facility, usually by a team of behavioral health and medical professionals. This type of care can last from a few days to two weeks and is meant to keep patients safe and ensure their basic needs are met until they are stabilized and ready for a less intense level of care.
- Subacute inpatient mental health care: Subacute inpatient mental health care is less intensive than acute inpatient care. Patients focus on their mental health while living onsite at a treatment facility, usually for two to four weeks. Patients receive a structured treatment plan and participate in individual and group therapies to improve their mental health. People who’ve been diagnosed with a mental health condition, but aren’t an immediate harm to themselves or others, are most likely to qualify for subacute inpatient mental health care.
- Outpatient therapy sessions: In outpatient therapy sessions, patients attend individual therapy sessions weekly or biweekly with their professional therapists, either onsite or through online telehealth appointments. These sessions help patients continue their lives while taking time for their mental health. Group therapy may also be offered as part of an outpatient program.
Many patients start in acute or subacute inpatient mental health care to address their mental health condition and often step down to long-term outpatient therapy sessions as they recover. It’s also not unusual for patients to only receive outpatient therapy sessions if they don’t require a higher level of care or for patients to stay in inpatient psychiatric care for a longer period of time if they continue to experience severe symptoms and still need that higher level of care.
Stage 3: Establishing Your Self-Worth
The next stage after mental health rehab is developing a strong sense of self-worth so that you feel worthy of having positive connections and supportive people around you during your mental health recovery journey.
Struggling with poor mental health may make it harder to establish your support system. You might not feel like you’re worthy of having a support system or really know where to look to make these new connections.
Establishing your sense of self-worth is the first step in building your support system in recovery. You need to feel good about yourself and know that you’re worthy of having family and friends around you that support you.
To help you feel worthy of a sober life and healthy relationships, try:
- New hobbies or picking back up with old activities you used to enjoy, like reading or journaling
- Eliminating negative self-talk and focus on positive thoughts and feelings
- Setting goals that can help you boost your confidence, like prioritizing doing the things that make you feel good about yourself, such as exercising
Stage 4 : Engaging With Peer Support
Once you’ve established a strong sense of self-worth and feel worthy of having supportive family and friends around you, the next stage in mental health recovery is engaging with peer support to build a healthy support system.
It’s common to feel alone and isolated in recovery because you may think that your mental health struggles aren’t understood. If you’re unsure where to look to build your support system, try connecting with your peers in recovery. Talking with people who are going through similar hardships and experiences with their mental health can help you bond, keep each other accountable and feel understood.
At The Recovery Village, we offer group therapy, which can help individuals build the support system they need. In group therapy, individuals:
- Get to know other group members
- Begin to understand yourself and what others are going through
- Build self-awareness
- Develop social skills
- Foster personal growth
- Support other members
When patients participate in group therapy sessions, either in inpatient or outpatient mental health treatment programs, they engage with their peers who are experiencing similar mental health challenges. This engagement can lead to patients forming supportive relationships that can also help them foster hope in the recovery process.
After your mental health rehab stay, continuing to attend support group meetings provides you with helpful insights and encouragement based on others’ experiences and accomplishments.
Stage 5: Coping With Stigma
Stigma can come from family members, friends and even coworkers. Some ways mental health stigma can manifest is through stereotypes, discrimination and labeling. Some examples include calling someone with a mental health disorder “crazy,” making fun of someone for seeking help for their poor mental health and labeling a person with anxiety as “weak.”
Because we internalize stigma from outside sources, being able to handle your self-stigma is also essential for your mental health recovery.
Some coping strategies to manage stigma include but are not limited to:
- Limiting interaction: distance yourself from those who stigmatize you. This involves individuals who label you and are discriminatory.
- Confide in your peers: confide and talk to your peers to help you process how stigma is impacting you.
- Open communication: openly communicate about how you’re impacted by insensitive statements to those who say them.
- Practice positive self-talk: when you catch yourself repeating stigmatizing language to yourself, re-frame it with a positive statement instead. For example, turn self-talk like “I’m so weak for not being able to handle this” into “Knowing that I need help is a sign of strength and self-awareness.”
Stage 6: Practicing Self Determination
The final stage of mental health recovery is staying motivated to continue your recovery journey by practicing self-determination. It’s essential for individuals struggling with poor mental health to understand that recovery doesn’t just happen, they have to work toward it consistently.
Part of your long-term mental health recovery is establishing personal goals and dreams you want to achieve and making them part of your care plan. These can be related to living, working, learning and participating in different communities.
Mapping out your personal goals can help you increase your self-awareness and encourage you to actively use mental health treatment, services and other support to help achieve them. Staying in recovery and actively managing your mental health is what makes these goals possible.
Starting Your Mental Health Recovery Journey at The Recovery Village
At The Recovery Village, we create personalized treatment plans for our patients so that they receive the care best suited for them. Our facilities provide evidence-based treatment, counseling for co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders, healing amenities and a variety of individual and group therapy options.
At The Recovery Village, we offer inpatient and outpatient mental health rehab with experienced, licensed therapists at the top of their fields. Our clinicians specialize in a variety of mental health conditions, including but not limited to depression, anxiety and PTSD.
Both inpatient and outpatient rehab services offer similar therapies to treat mental health disorders, like CBT, DBT, motivational interviewing, individual and group therapy. However, inpatient mental health rehab takes place in a residential setting where the patient lives at the facility full-time for several weeks. In outpatient rehab, patients attend scheduled appointments with their therapist weekly, either onsite at the location or in online teletherapy sessions.
