Þessi grein er skrifuð af meðlimum Stepping stones verkefnisins og er því á ensku.
During last year we worked with passion to create a visual guide for recovery, which is the first outcome of the project Stepping Stones. This work was done in a multicultural team of mental health workers from Hugarafl (Iceland), Minte Forte (Romania), L‘Ovile (Italy) and Herstel Talent (The Netherlands). After a delightful and naturally challenging work process, marked by a lot of creativity and diversity of views, the visual guide is now completed and ready to be released into the world.
The guide is meant to be a visual tool for understanding and exploring various aspects of the recovery process. It can be used by people recovering from mental health challeges, their relatives and friends, and by any peer or professional working with recovery.
Besides its multicultural and professionally-diverse origins, this guide has one more essential feature: people with lived experience of mental health challenges participated in every step of its creation. Each of the organizations involved organized focus groups with their users, to analyze their learning needs about recovery. Topics were collected and decided on, and we imagined illustrations that would best represent those topics. The artist created those illustrations and we piloted them with our users, collecting their feedback about their usefulness and how well their described various aspects of recovery.
So if you would like some inspiration about recovery, that is also informed by lived experience, you can check out the Stepping Stones visual guide. It covers 19 topics, such as keeping the balance, the ups and downs on the road to recovery, importance of support or managing personal resources. The illustrations and the short texts that accompany them can be used as conversation openers in recovery groups, as ways to introduce some ideas and to foster personal reflection and sharing, as inspiration bits on social media etc. We imagined some of the ways to use them, but we hope that this guide reaches many mental health workers and individuals in many countries and they can also add new possibilities of use.
You can download the guide here:
The Stepping Stones project is funded by the European Commission, through the Erasmus+ program.
