Source: Gemma Correll
What Is A Care Guide?
1 in 5 adults suffer from mental illness, with even more struggling with one of the many at some point in their lives. Due to stigma and symptoms, many people face difficulty managing, keeping track of, and talking about their diseases.
A Care Guide is how you can list your history, symptoms and helpful options for both your own needs and for the reference of loved ones or medical professionals. When you find yourself struggling, it’s a way to refer back and remember skills that you’ve developed over time. Sharing the guide helps the people around you better understand and help you when needed. I created this for the many people who work so hard every day to destigmatize mental health issues, and to make discussing hard issues with your loved ones easier. In analyzing many mental health tech options I found that many people found them overly complex and just wanted something simple they could create themselves.
At the moment, the care guide is a downloadable and customizable Word template you can fill out for your own needs. I hope to eventually turn this into a webform so that users can easily create a more colorful document to keep on hand.
THE GUIDE ITSELF
The Guide is made up of many sections, and since it’s in a word document feel free to customize whatever is needed and delete or rearrange pages as you like. Listed are: Introduction, History, General Information, Relevant Pop Culture/Media (These two are for sharing with people who are inexperienced with mental health), Typical Symptoms, Stressors, What to say, What to do in a variety of potential situations, various positive affirmations, basic needs checklist, more information, favorite foods, and emergency phone lines. For What to do, I focused on physical contact and Words of Affirmation, while Basic Needs involves Acts of Service. As this is different for each person, feel free to change as needed. Customizable spots are highlighted in gray, with resources that can be changed in blue font. DOWNLOAD HERE
I Have feedback
That’s great! This is an early draft of a project that I hope will eventually help many people, and the only way to get to that point is by getting feedback and making changes. I appreciate any and all thoughts, comments, questions, and suggestions. What would you like to see in a later version? Feel free to email at jillanerishah@gmail.com, DM/Tweet @jillanerishah or leave a note at the contact form below. Thank you for taking the time to read this and leave feedback!
“Thank you to everyone who read and helped with the original version of the care guide way back in 2018: Tori, Tierra, Lance, Sherwin, Katherine, Alyssa, Hanae, Tulsi, Shreya, Sitara, and many others. Thank you to everyone taking the time to read and/or critique the current version. And a special thanks to Spencer, for being the inspiration and biggest supporter of turning my word document into a real website that could actually help others. Work never happens alone, and this project is dedicated to everyone who has written or drawn or talked about mental health online or in person. The Care Guide is built on the work of so many across the internet, and I am so thankful for the time they have put into educating and informing others. Thank you so much ”