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Welcome, I'm Dr. Benjamin Druss, Professor and Rosalynn Carter Chair in Mental Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and the Health Systems Expert for SMI Advisor. I am pleased that you are joining us for today's SMI Advisor webinar, Wellness Tools for Personal and Professional Practice. Next slide. SMI Advisor, also known as the Clinical Support System for Serious Mental Illness, is an APA and SAMHSA initiative devoted to helping clinicians implement evidence-based care for those living with serious mental illness. Working with experts from across the SMI clinician community, our interdisciplinary effort has been designed to help you get the answers you need to care for your patients. Next slide. Today's webinar has been designated for one AMA PRA credit, one credit for physicians, one continuing education credit for psychologists, and one continuing education credit for social workers. Credit for participating in today's webinar will be available until April 9th of this year. Slides from the presentation today are available to download in the webinar chat. Select the link to view. Captioning for today's presentation is available. Click Show Captions at the bottom of your screen to enable. Click the arrow and select View Full Transcript to open captions in a side window. Please feel free to submit your questions throughout the presentation by typing them into the question area. The Q&A is found in the lower portion of your control panel. We'll reserve 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the presentation for Q&A. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce you to the faculty for today's webinar, Dr. Peggy Swarbrick. Peggy Swarbrick is the Associate Director of the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies and a professor in the Applied Department of Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology. She has worked for 26 years at the Collaborative Support Programs of New Jersey Wellness Institute Director. Over decades, she has developed and evolved a strength-based eight-dimensional wellness model that has been used for various populations as strength-based approach for whole health recovery and prevention. Dr. Swarbrick, thank you so much. We're really looking forward to your webinar. Yeah, well, thank you very much for everyone that's here today that's joining me. And just want to say, I just have no conflicts of interest related to this subject matter in this presentation. And I'm just really, really excited today to just kind of introduce to you or reintroduce to you some ideas that really hopefully are helpful for you, as we know in the presentation being wellness tools for personal and professional practice. You know, just kind of looking at this eight-dimensional model that you may or may not be aware of and just kind of seeing the model. And if you know about it already, that's great. But if you don't, it's going to be a really great opportunity to kind of think about the benefits of it and really how it helps in terms of prevention, treatment, recovery support, expose you to where and how you can access very accessible, user-friendly tools that could not only help you, and that's a big piece of it, but also people you served. I'll give you an access to this new inventory that we have available that you could use, you know, just talk a little bit about how to access it, and as well as looking at how to use it for perhaps even program evaluation and then just resources. So that's really the game plan, looking at the eight dimensions, reasons for focusing ourself before we use it with others, then how we can use it with others, kind of seeing your strengths in this area and considering how to use these personal as and professionally, that's really it. So why are we thinking about wellness and this idea of wellness self-care for professionals? We know in healthcare, there's just, our job is to educate, inspire, help people. We do such a great job at it. All of you are doing, do a great job of that at your colleagues, but then often sometimes tending to our own wellness sometimes because we're doing such a good job can be overlooked or neglected or not paid attention to. And we do see the burnout, fatigue, again, amongst us that affects us as well as people we serve, just it's a big challenge to our workforce. So really this idea of focusing on our own wellness, paying attention to this in a mindful, intentional way is really gonna potentially help us and the people we work at with. And it's not just me talking about this, like I've been talking about this for years, wellness, and I always developed this wellness model for both providers and people served. You'll see earlier, it came about mostly for people served, but we're seeing more of the importance of the workforce. So not only am I saying this, but the Surgeon General has put out a work, an advisory looking at data. I'm not gonna go into the details of that data. I encourage you to look at it, but there's a national focus on the workforce wellbeing that we know. You can read the National Academies and the Surgeon General report that really illustrates the importance of a lot of what we're talking about today. And the importance of you, you are important. You are the tool in this work that really helps make people's lives better and helping you to pay attention to this. So there's a lot of attention to this. The idea of burnout and turnover and things existed before COVID, but it's been really expanded upon. Awareness of it became more aware of the potential for burnout in our work or the real experience that many of us have had. I've had it over the time of my career. I've had to deal with it. And it's about the wellness pieces of us doing it. So we wanna help bring attention to this so when we get caught up in it, we can get out of it or we can help set up ways that we can prevent it, that exhaustion, that depersonalization, that sense of accomplishment. It's a horrible feeling. I've had it a couple of times through my career. And again, it's focusing on my wellness and always paying that attention for on and on. And my constant vigilance at it is important because we do our work, we're offering compassion, which puts us on vulnerability to that burnout. We have that compassion that we have, but sometimes it can lead to that fatigue that affects us emotionally because we care so much. It can affect that anxiety, depression for some of us and affects our feeling and like leading potentially to burnout and or people even leaving the field, really good people leaving the field. This is some part of the challenge that we affect. And there's also the risk in our work of the trauma that we may feel because you are such caring people. You're doing this important work to care for others that it puts us at risk of that stress and there is lots of good evidence to show that we are a challenge for this. And so my colleague and I, Amy Spagnolo, a couple of years, about two years ago, actually did a survey of people to see what some of these things were of the challenges like people were experienced to their wellness. And on top of them became that work-life balance was a big one, finding the time to take care of yourself. And that's why today on the wellness model I'll show you, it's helping to see finding the time. There was things with physical wellness, people were dealing with so many co-occurring issues for themselves or the people they serve, the job stress. And I think that's a lot of what the Surgeon General Report, if you want to look at that, has showed what are the workforce role in this. Today, we're talking about professional roles, but there's an advocacy role we have to do with our workforce to try to help. So a variety of these areas that were very challenging. And the biggest one we're broken down to is the work-life balance, finding time, and then that physical health. So today, those are the problems. I don't like to focus too much on those, but it's good to understand the landscape of why it's so important in some of these main challenges. And there's just an importance to focusing on that self-care. And there's a great article I refer to you here in the American Psychiatric Association that just really talks to a lot of what I'm here today, that really builds us to focus on self-care, being those things we do on a day-to-day basis. And I'm going to show you how the wellness model could affect this, how it helps us, what do we do to prepare to manage our stress each day, inevitable stress? What are those habits that we're doing each day that are buffering? So I welcome you to this idea of wellness self-care, those things you're doing each day to meet your needs in terms of the eight dimensions, physical, spiritual, social, intellectual, occupational, environmental, financial. Thinking about ourself from that holistic perspective, just though we use the model for people we serve, how do we think about ourself, about our own wellness needs? What are we doing strong? What can we strengthen? What is challenging us? And start to do things about it. So really, really important to think about your own self-care as we try to work for. And we want to think about it in that article, it highlights that it's really one of, we don't want to put all the pressure on you to do it, but it is, because that could even be more stressful for people, but we want to get away from the idea of hiding that vulnerabilities that we have and think about our self-care and having our work environment supported, having us support it for ourself is an important part of our ethical obligation to ourself and our work and not see it as a sign of weakness or selflessness or self-indulgence. It can be done and we need support around it. And I think that's one of the things we want to shift our attention to this. And I think there's definitely more awareness, which I think that is good to think about. And how do we think about our wellness plan that we can develop for ourself? And hopefully today you're going to come away with some tools to put into this plan for yourself, these wellness tools for your personal and how you can get support from other peers. So thinking about, you know, thinking about it from a prevention perspective for yourself, if you're doing well, just like RAP, Wellness Recovery Action Plan was a prevention, do this when you're well, what are we thinking about what we do already? So in those moments of clarity, thinking about today, hopefully you'll start to do your inventory, take your pulse that you can start to think about what am I already doing? And then perhaps trying to find others to support us in the way. So it's trying to think about those different wellness activities that I share. And I'm going to also, you know, want to try to help sharing this with each other, being vulnerable, sharing, getting peer support. And I'm going to, you know, just say, I'll give you some examples of some peer support models because we do need to support one another of this. So what I think I want to think about is thinking about, you know, why is some, you think about this, write this down for your, so you can share it or have a question about this. Why is self-care so important? And especially for our work, just reflecting on that and starting to have dialogues with one another, openness with one another to think about this, to be able to be aware of what you're doing and how you can strengthen that. When I talk about that wellness muscle, those physical, spiritual, social, intellectual. And why is it important? I'm always, you'll see a lot of wheels here. You know, there's the resilience and you have the resilience, that's stronger. We're at risk, there's health, when we're under stress, we're, you know, having that compassion fatigue, we're experiencing that trauma, we have that resilience. We might be in distress at times, right? We might lose sleep, we might be irritable, we might get distracted when we're going through some of those times. Some of it can result into some kind of mental health challenges that many of us may be at risk of developing. There's a lot of other risk behaviors that we may have, but they may still be there, but we have the resilience. And that's what I'm hopefully going to show you here, a way to kind of approach yourself, the lens of wellness. People think about wellness, wellness, I need to go to the gym or I need to do that. It might be something you do, but there's other things you're doing on a day-to-day basis that we can focus on. And what I like about wellness and why we've had this visualization of a wellness wheel is because what we focus in on expands. And wellness being this conscious, deliberate process where we become aware each day of what we're doing. And I love to show you this wheel of wellness that we've, you know, it's been involved. You've probably seen it in the work for people particularly with serious mental illness. There was a lot of work of adopting the wellness model, but this model is a model that providers are using, people that are doing this work can really look at for themselves. And when we think about how it relates to it, and I show you as I go along, a lot of times what we're doing in like our physical dimension or emotional dimension or occupational dimension, it's gonna have an effect on the others. So that's the greatest, the news about this model is that it has, they're interacting and interlocking and affecting one another in a way, in a positive way. I'll give a few examples as I go along, but I really encourage you to start to think about yourself from the different dimensions. I'm gonna walk through a little bit of a way to think about that. And the part of it is about your attitude. How do we shift our attitude? And this is one that I personally, I'm someone that I've been working in the field for many years. I've had my struggles throughout this, but the thing that helped Peggy with her wellness and what continues to help her, me, is my attitude. I have to constantly be paying attention to that shift, paying attention to where I'm paying my attention when I start to move. And that's really why the wellness has been so helpful. And also help, I start to take that pulse of my balance, where is my balance or imbalance and how do I go to my go-to wellness activities that I do on a day-to-day basis. And I got a ton of them listed in my toolbox that I can do. Sometimes it's hard to do them. Sometimes things get in the way, but I am aware of them. And I kind of start to try to help them to kind of restore that balance. And then it's also having that sense of control. That's another mantra that we have to think about for our, well, have to, but it's helpful to think about, you know, I do a lot of work in addiction recovery, but this affects all of us, the serenity statement that can help so many of us in those difficult moments or in those stressful times of the day to think about what we can and can't change and keep focused. So the wellness model has this ABC approach and then the focus on the wellness, which I'm gonna walk you through. And I encourage you to just think about what you do each day. You might seem, oh, I do that already. So that's not really matters, but it does matter. If you are paying attention to your sleep and sleep is something that's strong, that is a really good wellness tool. If you do often take a short walk, you take your dog for a walk, you get out in nature, you do those kinds of things. These are strengths. These are habits that we have. And I'm gonna help you walk through this as we go through here, thinking about what are your habits? And I would like you to write it down, record it. I've given you lots of tools as we go around, thinking about walking through this wheel and taking an inventory of yourself. And we're gonna put into the chat an inventory. I'll highlight a little bit more about it later, but there's an inventory that if you say, I don't really know, you can go into the chat and you can actually start to take an inventory about what are you doing on a day-to-day basis for physical and emotional social. You can start to take a look at that, but you can think about starting with the physical or starting with any of them, but I encourage you to start to just, what do I do and what would I like to do? What do I do each day? And walk around it. For example, what are you doing now already? You all did something to get here today. Whatever it was, put it in the blank. You did something physically that was helping you to get here. What I kind of think for myself is these are my things I do, is I have, this is part of my schedule of my wellness tools is taking that deep breath in traffic. I have a little breeze stone. I have a lot of cues in there because I just don't like driving, especially as I've gotten older. It was always a stressful time. I wound up affecting my day, but finding something I could do in the day-to-day for my physical wellness, doing that. Writing in a calendar, that's a thing I'm a big calendaring person. Taking that walk. I really prioritize it now these days because there's a lot of things to do and know that it's so important. And then going to bed at the same time for me is something. Now you have your own thing, just like your clients you work with are, but I'd encourage you to start writing that down, recording for yourself what it is you do, and then starting to keep attention to it. Many people will find nourishing foods helped. The sleep is a big one. Finding those relaxation and stress management or doing some kind of movements. There's way more things in the physical dimension. These are just a couple of them to get us thinking, but I encourage you to even write them down for yourself. And even if you could find a trusted supporter, your fellow colleagues to talk about these things because there's a value of sharing with one another that one time in my life, one of my things I would have put on here was swimming. Swimming for 24 years was my go-to wellness activities, wellness tool. And it stopped working when I had a lot of stress and a lot of losses in my life. But listening to other things that people were doing gave me the idea about the walking. I also have a couple of other wellness habits I do with the stretching that have really filled the gap for me. Swimming stopped working for me at a time that was really critical. So talking to others and hearing what other people do can give us ideas. The financial dimension is one that is also a big one. People think, oh my goodness, financial is big stress, but are we just mindful? Are we making educated decisions? Are we recording our income? Are we noticing those triggers? These small habits that you have can make a big difference, especially with the attitude, our minds, the stress we get from money, a really a big one with financial wellness. And I'll also again, later of tools on our website, basically we have a curriculum called building financial wellness that we developed. We've just in a randomized control study of that. It's a publicly available on the website later on. I'll show you that you might wanna just share with clients, but you might find it very helpful for yourself as well, financial dimension. So then again, these are the things that I do a lot for myself. They're just simple habits, but they keep me in check with it. And when you get a little bit worried, these are things I say to myself, I can do these things. So encourage you to think about things you already do or things you might wanna try for yourself. The environmental dimensions, living, learning, working environments. These are definitely things that can help our, cause we're in the living, learning and working environments all the time. What are we doing? I'm always, I've been more aware of posting images in my spaces. Recycling is good, it's important, but what are we doing as well, like getting outside? What are the things you do for your environmental wellness? Things that you do to keep your environment in a way that can potentially be organized. If you someone that works for you, getting outside, being in safe places, being in nature, being in places that feel comfortable and then doing stuff for the larger environment as well, that can be important. So that's a big one for ourself to think about the places and spaces you're in and then trying to think about what are you doing or can you do. The emotional dimension is a big one as well. Thinking about the things that we do to deal with our stress, the things we do to reach out and connect with others, but finding those things, those are particularly what I find with people, especially when we get into that burnout or compassion fatigue mode, is that enjoyment of things becomes challenging. So trying to think about what are we doing and the enjoyment of the activities we're doing and those things that you can do each day to help us to just have that more pleasure in what we're doing and just laughing. Laughing is something that can really be a powerful, cathartic, emotional release for us. So thinking about those things and making an attention of what is doable in your day-to-day routine. And another way of thinking about, you know, again, here's some other things around what I talk about spiritual being the next dimension. And this one is a tricky one because people think, oh, I know my church, I know I'm in church, not the way we define spirituality in this wellness model. It's those things you do with purpose, meaning, connection, and, you know, it's personally defined. This was a dimension that I know when we first introduced people got a little worried that people, but it's a powerful dimension. What do you do? One of my things that I find has been helpful is doing sort of these yoga type stretching things has been a powerful spiritual release for me personally and getting outside without the phone. Keeping the phone is very hard to do at times, but not having, but going out and just then being there is a very helps me to be more spiritual and connected to lose that disconnected from those things that start to pull me and sometimes stress me. And then just sort of sitting quietly with ourself at times. And just, again, a lot of these things are microseconds of things you can do, microminutes. That's what wellness really is about wellness habits when you think about breaking it down from this wellness model. So I encourage, you know, if those of you have questions about any of these things or even putting it, you know, in the chat, I love that someone said laughing often. It's just so important. And I think about it, like I think about my, as my mother passed not too long ago, and, you know, I started, I'm starting to like realize I'm a lot more like her in so many ways, which I never realized, but one of the things she loved to laugh, she also loved to smile. And I gotta tell you, I have a, people always tell me, you don't smile a lot. And in recent years, I've been trying, initially intentionally tried to smile more and I'm becoming more natural. It's powerful. It affects, it can change things in such a powerful way. So again, smiling, laughing, sounds silly, but it's so important for, you know, for our wellness in a big way. So I'm really, really thinking about that. So then the other one that's, again, this is also, again, spirituality, very personally defined and learning, whatever it is, but a way, again, you'll see in the, in the survey that the inventory that we've developed, it's about like connecting to our values. It's doing those rituals that are aligned with our values and beliefs. Another good strat, there's a lot of good evidence, especially in healthcare, there's a good study looking with healthcare providers of doing certain gratitude practices on a regular basis, just taking that moment and say, what went good today? And how did I contribute to that? Like making a mental note of looking at that, reflecting on it, working with healthcare providers, it was a really good study on that. The important to think about, and many of you may do it already, or some of your own spiritual traditions may have that in it. It's a really good tool. And then just kind of thinking about what we're doing, you know, in a mindfulness way. Occupational is another one. Again, occupational can be our work, could be our school, it could be our caregiver roles. I think that's how I, as I developed the wellness model over these years, I've tried to conceptualize it with those three categories. It's the work, it's the school, it's those volunteer, it's the caregiving. It's those things that bring that structure to your life that you're doing often to, you know, you're gonna see a slide in a few minutes that have connection to others and supporters. It's really though, again, that you feel good about using your skills and talents, very important for our wellness. We know with people, serious persistent mental illness who are not working, very occupational being a low score on things, powerful impact mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually for them as well. And I found that in a lot of my work. That's why I try to help is really to try to think about why it's so important to think about, well, occupational in this way, and think about it in a way that what are the different activities? You know, I do myself work full-time or work part-time, I'll work when they want, but I use the calendaring to keep that balance, to keep the balance between all of the things for myself. Occupational, you may fill it in so many different ways that it is, one of the things that I love about this next slide that identifies in terms of what occupational wellness means and what probably where you can fill in the gap for what the activity is that it's activities that are you're doing with purpose and meaning, whether it's a volunteer, it's your schoolwork, it's your paid work, or it's the work that you're doing of taking care of your family or as a, you know, your parents or your children or someone in your family, it's something you like to do, someone needs it, there's an emotional or spiritual or potential financial payment for it, and it's also something you're good at or you're developing that skill. So that's a big component of that. So thinking about that from occupational perspective. The other dimension, two dimensions to go or the intellectual and social dimension, but when we think about intellectual, it's not necessarily school, it's what are we doing that we're doing things I'll go back to mine in a minute, but when I highlight what they are here, and we'll head to the slide for a minute, intellectual things could be learning from other people, looking up information, trying to learn things that there's a lot of creative activities that many people identify that are really important for intellectual wellness, drawing, writing, you know, all kinds of creative things, cooking, people talk about different types of hobbies, people talk about, that's why like I'll show you, here is hobbies, like the different creativity, could be music, these kinds of activities, very powerful for our wellness, and sometimes get lost while we're really stressed with a lot of work or a lot of caregiving responsibilities, but what are those things we do? And it can just be taking that time to go back and doing a hobby or learning a new hobby for ourself. The other dimension, again, is the social one, a big one, and people always say, which is the most important dimension, Peggy? And I say, all of them, they're all equally important. And then for each of us individually, we have one that we're stronger in, we're feeling better about, and that's personally defined. And what you do, as I said, I'm just giving you more conceptual ideas and some specific things, but it's really for you to take a look at yourself and see what are the things you are doing, because you are all doing a lot for your wellness. And then it's paying attention to, okay, what maybe I wanna strengthen or what do I wanna keep just going, it's working for me, that's something you, as I talk about some wellness plans, we'll highlight how you can start to organize that for yourself. But the social support, the social connection, being able to connect, get and receive support in a reciprocal way, having our, not trying to limit our contact with the draining connections that drain us. It's inevitable, but being able to be mindful of that in trying to create the space to not allow it to drain us and trying to variety of people, as well as a big one that we find is important is having a variety of supporters in your life for support. So I give you a little walk around the wheel, as you can see, it's in the background here, you're probably seeing this wheels a lot. I wanna just highlight now to think about taking this kind of information as you went through and you thought about for yourself, what are the things you're doing already? What are some of the tools? How do we create a self-care plan? And I'll direct you to this website here, which you'll be able to kind of download. There's a tool where you can just kind of map that out for yourself. You can do what I just did now and record down your strengths, where are your strengths? There's a section to kind of look at maybe where there's a little bit of a imbalance for yourself to think about it, but it's so important for self-care. And I have a funny story that about wellness self-care. You know, I've been talking about this for a long time, but about a year ago, a colleague said to me, Peggy, your wellness wheel is in the Costco magazine about self-care. And I said, what? I don't know what you're talking about. I don't get the Costco magazine, but sure enough, here it is. This is the page from the Costco magazine, 2023, January. They were talking about self-care. What's your favorite type of self-care? So today I'm asking you, what's your self-care or your favorite type of self-care? But they actually really, again, this presentation today, very aligned with this. They're talking about the wellness dimensions. They had it right here. They cited the eight dimensions from SAMHSA, which was quite surprising to me, but it just gave me the idea, okay, maybe this is something a lot of people want to be thinking about. And I'm glad all of you were here today thinking about this, but even Costco was sharing this with readers because I think it's such an important, for our work, your work especially, but the community wellness self-care is a big thing. And that's who you're serving. You're serving people in the community. So why don't we think about what could we do? What are some tools that are there? We have this resource here that's on this website. You can go to and download it. And there's actually, the way it's designed, it's fillable for yourself. You could create your own plan. Some people can do this on their phones. There's probably apps too. I'm an old fashioned paper, pencil person. This is when you could fill it in. You could put it in a PDF, but it's a nice little tool to remind us the idea about many of the different dimensions are covered here. There's a little bit of that gratitude reflection for spirituality or spiritual or emotional dimension. There's also just an opportunity for you to put in what is your activity? You don't have to have something in each of the dimensions, but it gives you a prompt, going back to what I just reviewed. But it also highlights the sleep piece because that is one that people, doesn't matter if you don't have the perfect sleep, but what is the time you wanna start to prepare and what's the time you wanna wake up? And maybe that becomes a work in progress for yourself if you wanna adjust it in a way that's working well. And then the power of breathing, just taking time to do things to breathe. I do wanna reinforce the importance of sleep being one that we do pay attention to our first up because that is definitely one of the number one things that we hear over and over again, seeing that our survey that we did of healthcare providers is sleep. And there's a thing, it's not gonna go into too much of the detail on this. You could probably go on to a lot of trainings on it, but our being aware of our circadian rhythms, our sleep and wake cycles, that's also a part of this conscious deliver process of wellness is then being aware of that. And then trying to think about our wellness habits that fit around the 24 hour schedule, trying to match those activities we're doing that fit our body clock, that are in sync with when our body's most ready to be active, working, focused, ready to kind of slow down. It's a work for many of us because we've fought against it sometimes in terms of things that have been demanded in our life, but it's an area that I encourage you to think about for yourself. And also for particularly many times, it might be something that many of the people you're working with or struggling with and you're helping them with. So the sleep piece, and I just put this one very simple slide here that just gives us a sense across the lifespan. What's the ideal? Often many people are not often in the ideal range, but as I've gotten older and I've learned how to manage my own vulnerabilities, I definitely try to keep in mind, I'm in the 60 year old range there, 26 to 64 year old range, that's my range. And I do try to creep the seven to nine, it's not perfect, but it's something I try to pay attention to. And I know a lot of people I work with, that's something that they're reporting with. And we are sharing strategies with ourselves. Another piece to think about in terms of keeping our own plan or wellness plan, going back to something, thinking about all the different dimensions, this is a movement, as I mentioned, the physical dimension it could be helpful for, but it has an effect on some and the others. People sometimes, oh, I don't have enough time. It doesn't matter, you don't have enough time. There's even little snacks you can take, taking a movement snack, for example, just getting out, move, walk, going outside for just a couple of minutes, good evidence to show that that can just be as helpful as really making this, okay, I have to go for this long workout at the gym, but finding those ways you can move, put movement into your routines and moving your body in ways that are mindful, could have a real powerful impact on our mental health, our physical health, our stress, and our work. It's challenging, I know, but definitely something to think about for yourself. When can you build in these habits around that? And it's gonna have an effect on many of the dimensions. Another one, very powerful impact that could potentially have is the idea of music. Again, music can be used for so many of our emotions. It could activate us, it could calm us, it can breed us in different kind of mood states. And this is one that when we think about terming about people looking at the type of music and putting music into their, whatever activates us, what calms us, putting a playlist together. Many people have found that that's helpful as a tool, many other colleagues, they're just sharing a few of these ideas, but they can really affect our mood in a very, very positive way. So thinking about that, you probably maybe already do it, but it definitely has a mental, physical, social benefit. The other piece, again, was one that was mentioned was the nature, getting outside, just being outside a little bit can help us in a big, big way. So again, you'll see how these relate to the different dimensions, and they're just simple, some text. Other tools that I, oh, this is the evaluate, inventory we'll send you to, you can think about using it for your own, but you could also use it for program evaluation as well, beyond your own wellness, if you're thinking about using these tools for clients you served. A lot of the things that I'm sharing can be used personally, but also sharing with people, and you can use them for program evaluation. So you can go up on this website here, you'll be able to go up. It's a simple inventory, and it goes right up, you'll get a score, and you can share it with others, keep track of it each month, go back in and see if there's shifts and changes over the course of the month. But it's a nice little tool people have found that is helpful for them to keep track of what we call their wellness, I call it the wellness pulse, right? Keeping our pulse of our physical, spiritual, social, intellectual, occupational, and environmental dimension. So I encourage you to think about it. So another one of a tool is, okay, these are other tools. These two websites is where you can get a plethora of resources, and I'm gonna just highlight a few of them. But the Solutions Suite in Health and Recovery has a number of things that I've worked on with myself and Dr. Judith Cook from the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have a lot of tools, the financial wellness curriculum is there. We have a really good tool called Enhancing Immune Health, that's very nice that you can pick for yourself or you could use with people served. And a lot of other wellness tools and self-directed care tools are on that website. So they're all free, downloadable, and also they each have like a podcast and a webinar, small, short little webinar type thing, very short on how to use the tool. The other is at the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Study that Rutgers has a lot of these other wellness tools. It has the inventory I mentioned, has the self-care tool that you can perhaps start to complete for yourself. And those are all there, like I said, downloadable. Other tools, this is a nice tool up on the University of Illinois, Chicago website I wanna highlight, because there's a lot of them. So I just wanted to point out a few. The Journaling for Wellness is a nice one, a lot of providers have found that one's helpful. It goes over different kinds of journaling and a couple of things on how you can connect it to the wellness and has some additional resources. So you can use it personally yourself. Many people have used it in running groups with it. They've shared it with clients they work with and it's been helpful. This other resource is a nice tool if any of you do group work, this is a nice one. It has a variety. It's very scripted session plans around not all of the eight dimensions, but some of them. And it's very relevant to the populations that you work with. So it just focuses on some of these healthy habits and has sort of a goal setting component to it, but it's really nice tools in this worksheets for clients or for yourself that you can use. This next one is, this is the immune health facility and there's a facilitator guide here and a participant guide here. So this one again is up there on the University of Illinois Chicago website. You can see as the free downloadable pieces. This one has been piloted. It's currently under a randomized control study being done but it's a publicly available right now. You can access it. And we find people have found it helpful. This is one of the most, this is just an updated version of one of the most popular tools of why SAMHSA even adopted the wellness dimensions. This was a tool that I had developed many years ago that just did like a checklist, a checklist of things people could do for the wellness people found was helpful. So this is a tool you can download at the, reach out to me for this at the collaborative support programs in New Jersey website but it's very nice for individuals, groups and or just a little check with yourself. If you don't like the numbers, some people don't like numbers like on the inventory. This is just a nice little checklist tool that you can find. The other great thing is it's available in Spanish now. We just recently have had it. We re-updated it and we put it into Spanish as well. So that's really nice. This is another tool that I just recently worked on. That's available at the University of Illinois website, Rutgers University website. Sorry, I'm getting them mixed up. Rutgers University website, the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Study. This is a nice little tool that's also up there that really highlights on four things. How to unplug, how to connect, focuses importance of sleep and doing good. So it's a nice booklet. There's a 20 page booklet and then a two page version of it that we have, it was co-developed by providers and peer providers and it's been pilot tested as well. People found it was very helpful as a tool like an engagement tool or a tool that you could use to reinforce people's wellness and or recovery goals. So that's another tool you can download and access. This is a piece where in the small, in both versions of it, there's just like a little space where you can just write down a daily action sheet. The other tool that's available up on the Rutgers site is part of a project that we did based on some of that data that I shared at the very beginning, where we did a series for healthcare providers like yourself and we developed tool, we accessed tools. There was peer support tools, individual tools and organizational tools. So it's a nice site that has a lot of different resources that you can access for example, the individuals has a lot of things about the eight dimensions some of the things I mentioned already are in there as well as there's a host of other things and even videos and such. The organizational strategies are things that are, or if you're from a leadership perspective, they're organizational tools to help support a wellness culture and a wellness in the eight dimensions as well. And then there's also a section on peer support approaches, developing ways that you can support, provide peer support in the workplace as well. So that's up on that website. And then this is another one that, this one is also in that Rutgers University site or you can go to this other link to another site at Rutgers where we actually created this guide for professionals. And it has also a video, it has a practices around pausing, breathing and moving. So it's a nice, it's about 20 minutes total there, but it's broken up in the pauses about four minutes, the breathe is about another four or five minutes and then the move section. So it's, you need, some people need like a visual reminder in addition to the book kind of here. So that's another tool that would be available to help in many of the different dimensions. So again, I have a lot of resources here, many resources to go back to some of the things we had. And I think we're at the point for, we're moving into the point for our questions, I believe to have enough time for that. Thanks, Peggy. That was really wonderful. A lot of just incredibly useful tools and guidance for clinicians. So, but Peggy mentioned, we're gonna be shortly shifting into Q&A. Before that, I wanna take a moment and let you know that SMI Advisor is accessible from your mobile device. You can use the SMI Advisor app to access resources, education and upcoming events, complete mental health rating scales and even submit questions directly to our team of SMI experts can download the app now at smiadvisor.org forward slash app. So first of all, in the Q&A, there's a lot of gratitude and thankfulness for your presentation, Peggy. So I wanted to just share that and chime in as well. There were a few, a couple of questions that I guess might fall under the category of what you called organizational wellness. A couple of people, one person asked about sort of this idea of moral injury, which I guess I think of as when you're working in an environment where there's challenges in being able to do what you feel is the right thing clinically and another question around sort of broader organizational strategy beyond kind of personal self-care that you see as being helpful and how people can think about supporting those where they work. Yeah, no, I think some great questions. And I think like definitely we can't ignore that the organizational structure and the processes in a lot of those systems are part of this problem that's experienced. It's not an individual thing. And I think that's one of the greatest things about some of the report from the Surgeon General and some of these other things. But I think when you're in that space and you're in an organization that's like, you're feeling that pressure cooker thing, what I found, because I've been around a lot of these, it's finding the channels and the people to kind of speak out. Sometimes we yell it out or scream it out because we're so triggered by it. So it's finding the way to get, and I'm doing a lot with peer support, finding peer supporters to help us elevate the voices around these things, especially when it comes to this idea of moral injury of things to bring these to conscious awareness of these people in leadership. And it's not always gonna change the answer right away, but I think the more the consciousness awareness of it is, you are starting to trickle away at the problem. So I don't have an exact solution for it, but I definitely don't bottle it up. Don't scream it to the mountain hodgepodge now, maybe later, but do it in a way. Find your, and find the people, because I was always that person. Or I was that person. And I found the person who could bring it. I found the person who could speak the language of the people who needed to hear it. They got to debrief Peggy and, you know, but find that way for yourself, whatever your style is, but don't stuff it. Don't leave right away. Maybe we have to leave. I had to leave at a point in my life where I did have that happen, where I didn't leave a place because it actually happened like one and a half kind of times where I just literally said, I have to move out of this space. And it was, you know, and it was the best thing. And, but don't go too quickly from the space because there's probably so many more people like you who you can align with, get support, and then bring this to the conscious work of others. Peer support helps too. We've been doing a lot with peer support. We have an informal peer support program that we've developed through the university, and we're working at some of the medical schools in this. I think it's a model. I wonder, I'm probably gonna write something about it and even send a thing to psych services about it because I feel it's probably happening in mental health and behavioral health, but I think developing peer support models for one of the other is, will be helpful. You're probably doing it already, but getting the organizational leadership to support it, which they are, is something could help. Yeah, when you say peer support, it sounds like you're talking about not only the kind of peer support that we might typically think about, which is sort of maybe, you know, with training to be a certified peer specialist, but you're talking about also creating a space for colleagues to kind of share experiences and work together. We created a peer support program, the shared lived experiences, a healthcare provider in a stressful environment. That's the lived experience. And the organization has, you know, they've approved this. We have a chief wellness officer, Dr. Chantal Bozell. She's our lead. She oversees the program, and it's not reporting functions. And sometimes there's these reporting functions on peer providers. We did it in a very informal kind of a way. So we train them in a subset of peer support skills to just really help be able to be there for your colleague and that kind of a model. And so it's not like paid peer support, like we know in the behavioral health space with it's really training peer supporters to use the workforce to provide peer support to fellow colleagues. Yeah, I really liked that. The lived experience is the lived experience as someone doing this kind of work in this kind of setting. That's wonderful. Yeah, and I guess my other, yeah, a lot of, again, a lot of just shout outs and appreciation in the questions. One other question, a kind of a high level that I had, as I was looking at all those wonderful tools that you're presenting. So some of them were almost all of them would apply to clinicians and peer supporters like themselves in terms of their own wellness. How do you see that when you're working, say within an organization or with providers, offering it to their clients? How do you see that working? There was a question about that particular kind of client in a particular kind of situation or the particular kind of condition. How do you think about that piece? How do providers help their clients use these wellness tools for their own wellbeing? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on what, like you probably have a good sense of the general needs of the group you have, but maybe there's a way to kind of look at some of these and just maybe introduce some of them. I think even just starting either with that inventory or that wellness one that I mentioned, if you go to the slide where it says it's also in Spanish, that's a tool people love it. People contact me all the time for decades now that they've used that one. It sparks the awareness for people of their wellness because, and then you can start to hone in on like, okay, we wanna do more of a financial dimension or emotional dimension, but sometimes it's good to just start with a simple, either one of those checkbooks or even introducing the wheel to people sometimes. That's how I started it. I personally used it many years ago personally, but then when I started to use it with people, it was very appealing to people to talk to them about their wellness because they're so, oh, you have your symptoms, your signs, you can't do this, all that negativity. The wellness model, that was one of the things that was very important for people. It's strength-based focus of our conversation with them. So it helps with that engagement. So that might be one start point. Yeah, it seems like it maps really well onto, it creates sort of a structure for talking about recovery because it's, is that sort of where either some of this came from or then influenced because it gives a lot of the same domains and it's a better zooming out and being strength-based and being, yeah, more. But it starts out with the strengths and then people say, I'm good at this, I'm good at this. And that's what I used to hear from people. They would tell me all these things they were great at, but then everybody's telling me this, I can't do this, I don't do this well. But when people start to talk about their strengths, real or perceived, it's all perception. But even if that strength, I might not see it as a strength for them. If they think that's a strength and they did it 20 years ago, that's important. That's that attitude, it shifts. Even though they're thinking about something from 20 years ago, it's remembering, they're remembering something they were good at. And in that moment, and we have to reinforce the things that they're good at. And that was one of the things that really helped me to realize this model is so important. Yeah, great, great point. There was one kind of sort of specific advice question around sleep, which is, you know, given the importance and you showed those, you know, the amount that we all need for people who are kind of sleep deprived in their, during the week, what about sleeping in? Is that something, is that a good thing? Is that, does that sort of make up for the lost sleep that they might not have gotten during their week? Yeah, I mean, I'm not a sleep expert. I don't want to say it all. I do read up on this. They do read that. That's not like the, it's not the best approach or long-term from what I understand in the reading. Did I do that for years? Yes, that was my strategy for years. That was my strategy. It's no longer that, doesn't mean that it helped me. I'm here today, so, okay. So you want to try to think about how it is, but maybe into the long-term pattern of it, that's where you might want to just, you know, just get some checking out with people because there is probably more benefit to help keep it in a more regular throughout the week as much as possible, but everyone's circumstance is different. So we definitely just, as an individual way, is just kind of see how that's working for yourself and then start to figure out other ways maybe to tweak that if that's a possibility. Yeah, a lot of what I took away from that slide from your presentation was just sort of the importance of the routines and the structures. So almost more than the exact number of hours having kind of a very regular routine where your body kind of gets in a regular cycle. Reading up on, there's a lot of good things on the circadian rhythm and how that affects our wellness habits. I encourage all of us to think about that, aligning that. And that was when it, for personally, that for why I'm here today, that's one of the things I did many years ago and I continue to pay attention to that because I was constantly fighting myself at times and I didn't realize that it was my habits and routines that was causing a lot of my distress and my not-so-wellness. So, and it was not always easy to do because you have to work or you have these other things, but you can chip away at things that help figure out your balance. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, we're almost at the hour and just, yeah, maybe one, it's not so much a question. I mean, just a lot of thanks in the questions and one person talking about that they've been using the wheel and that it's just helpful to go beyond kind of thinking about wellness as primarily about physical health. And I know I've, that personally, that's been something for me that I've always really liked about your dimensions is they include all these other domains that are important to keep in mind, but that may get kind of forgotten in clinical settings. So, with that, we'll move on to the consult slide, I guess. Go back to the slides. And there we go. So, as my advisor offers a number of resources, if you wanna first discuss with your colleagues this topic or other related topics, you can post a question or comment on our discussion board. It's an easy way to network and share ideas with other clinicians who participate in the webinars. And if you have other questions that are, yeah, that one, yeah, perfect. Oh, the one before. If you have other questions about any topic related to evidence-based care for SMI, you can get an answer within one business day from SMI advisors, national experts on SMI. The service is available to all mental health clinicians, peer support specialists, administrators, and anyone else in the mental health field who works with individuals who have SMI. It's free and confidential. Next slide. So, SMI advisor includes more evidence-based guidance on wellness, such as the webinar, the digital peer support specialist role in health and wellness. This webinar will explore the platforms, contexts in which peer support specialists are using technology to deliver these services. And we'll feature developments in the scientific literature on digital peer support services. You can access the webinar by clicking the link in the chat or downloading the slides. Next slide. You can claim credit for participating in today's webinar. To do so, you need to meet the attendance threshold for your profession. After the webinar ends, please click continue to complete the program evaluation. The system will verify your attendance for credit claim. It can take up to an hour and vary based on local, regional, and national web traffic and usage of the Zoom platform. Next slide. This is our upcoming webinar. Please join us next week on February 15th as Dr. Humphreys Wadsworth presents Zero Suicide, Taking a Systems Approach to Suicide Prevention in Healthcare. This free webinar will be February 15th from 3 to 4 p.m. on Thursday. Thank you again for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Swarbrick. Until next time, take care.
Video Summary
In the SMI Advisor webinar, Wellness Tools for Personal and Professional Practice, Dr. Peggy Swarbrick introduced the eight-dimensional wellness model as a tool for self-care and recovery. The dimensions include physical, spiritual, social, intellectual, occupational, environmental, financial, and emotional wellness. She emphasized the importance of paying attention to our own wellness as healthcare providers, as well as the need to support each other in maintaining wellness in a high-stress work environment. Dr. Swarbrick highlighted several tools and resources that can be used to support wellness, such as the Wellness Inventory, the Wellness Wheel, and the Sleep and Immune Health Guide. She also discussed the importance of establishing routines and habits that promote wellness, such as getting enough sleep, engaging in physical activity, and finding activities that bring joy and fulfillment. Dr. Swarbrick encouraged participants to use these tools and resources personally and to share them with their clients to support their own wellness and recovery. Overall, the webinar provided valuable insights and practical tips for incorporating wellness practices into personal and professional life.
Keywords
SMI Advisor webinar
Wellness Tools
eight-dimensional wellness model
self-care
recovery
physical wellness
tools and resources
establishing routines
promote wellness
wellness practices
Funding for SMI Adviser was made possible by Grant No. SM080818 from SAMHSA of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, SAMHSA/HHS or the U.S. Government.
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