If you are feeling OK but planning on making some changes that might affect your mood, now is the time to do a little prevention work.
A young man we know decided to go to visit his guru in Sri Lanka. It was a wonderful trip and changed his life for the good. It might have turned into a catastrophe but for the fact that he took our advice and wrote up a crisis prevention plan because he lost his medications early in the trip.
Another young man went off to make his fortune in China and he did not do so. To our great sorrow, he also ran out of his medications but because he hadn’t done the crisis prevention work he had not backup plan, ended up going to an emergency room in Shanghai where they totally missed his developing psychosis and discharged him. Later that night he jumped to his death from his hotel room.
Of course we know that won’t happen to you, but if you are thinking about coming off your medications, or taking an important trip, or if you are coming up on a time when you may be more likely to have a mood crisis, this is the perfect time to make sure that you will be fine.
The good news is this – in our experience, if you do the work, you will almost certainly prevent a crisis. It also is usually the case that everyone who knows and cares for you will be very relieved to learn that you have done this.
And it isn’t that hard.
A very good outline for a plan is available from Mary Ellen Copeland. She calls it the Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) and you can find out about it using one of these links. Or you can go to her website.