It can’t be emphasized enough how effective mental health treatment is. One in five adults in the U.S. experience mental illness, and one in 20 people have serious mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

But NAMI notes that between 70% to 90% of people who pursue psychological treatment and support notice a significant, stark reduction in their symptoms and an improvement in their quality of life.

If you’ve considered seeking mental health treatment or are currently entering individual therapy, do you ever wonder how your therapist keeps track of your progress? Is there any sort of recovery and wellness roadmap that you’ll follow with some actionable steps? Does it remain fixed, or can it change course depending on your diagnosis, symptoms, or talking points covered in talk therapy? Most of all, how will you know what to do after you leave treatment?

The answer to these types of questions is in what’s called a mental health recovery action plan. It’s essentially a structured guide, personalized and designed to help you navigate mental health recovery from the moment you sign up for treatment to the time you exit.

Here’s a look at what you can expect to find in an action plan for mental health challenges and how it can help if you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, or other issues.

What Is a Mental Health Recovery Action Plan?

A mental health recovery plan also called a wellness recovery action plan (or WRAP for short), is a personalized, step-by-step guide that you develop with your therapist when you’re in treatment at a facility, designed to keep you on track, manage your symptoms and work toward your personal wellness goals.

“WRAP is a self-management and recovery system developed by a group of people who had mental health difficulties and who were struggling to incorporate wellness tools and strategies into their lives,” notes NAMI.

Your WRAP may outline specific steps of your entire recovery journey (here’s a sample from one of NAMI’s branches) and may include:

A list of personal triggers, early warning signs, and things that do and don’t help

Coping strategies and self-care techniques

A crisis plan for any potential severe episodes

Post-crisis planning and steps to take

A list of medications you may be prescribed

A support network of family, friends, or other emergency contacts

Things these trusted people can do for you

Long-term wellness goals and your important responsibilities

Why Is Having a Plan for Mental Health Recovery Important?

Notice how, in the above-bulleted list, your action plan for mental health contains steps you can put into practice every day. These are actionable efforts that you’ll write down, in your own words, as a guidebook, a reference you can turn to and know how to act and react if you’re feeling triggered.

Having a thoughtful plan in place helps you recognize patterns in your mental health and make overwhelming moments more manageable. Now, you’ll know how to respond if you feel symptoms coming on. You’ll know how to avert a crisis, who to call, what to do, and how to stay grounded.

What Can a Mental Health Recovery Action Plan Help With?

A well-crafted mental health recovery action plan or WRAP works best when you can articulate as much as you can. You know yourself best, and with the internal work explored with your therapist, your action plan for mental health becomes an indispensable resource, like your own personal self-help manual. Treat it like a journal containing personal instructions written by you, for you. What are your needs? What do you need to focus on?

One way your WRAP might start to take shape is when considering the unique facets of the mental health issues you may be working on addressing. Here are some examples:

Mental Health Recovery Action Plan for Anxiety

Anxiety disorders are the most common in the U.S. and affect more than 40 million adults — 6.8 million with generalized anxiety disorder. If you suffer from anxiety, you’re aware that symptoms (nervousness, tension, excessive worry, or hyperventilation, among others) can overwhelm and interfere with daily life. Your mental health recovery action plan can act as a go-to guide for anxiety relief, integrating relaxation techniques, mindfulness practices, or coping strategies.

Mental Health Recovery Action Plan for Depression

Worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), depressive disorders affect 5% of the population. Depression can leave you feeling isolated, cut off from the world, and unmotivated, marked by feelings of sadness, despair, anger, and worthlessness, in addition to fatigue and trouble with mental acuity. A depression recovery plan complements your therapy by putting down on paper some positive daily routines you can turn into good habits while identifying emotional triggers and incorporating self-care activities to promote some stability.

Mental Health Recovery Action Plan for Trauma

The WHO says that about 70% of every person worldwide will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives and that 5.6% will develop PTSD. Any type of trauma, from surviving an accident or natural disaster to being victimized in an assault, can leave lasting scars that invade every facet of one’s life. In tandem with therapy, a trauma recovery plan or PTSD recovery plan focuses on processing difficult emotions and how to respond proactively when they begin to trigger you — it’s meant, in essence, to build safety when you feel unsafe.

Mental Health Recovery Action Plan for Personality Disorders

Conditions like borderline, paranoid, or antisocial personality disorders affect just over 9% of the entire population, with a 1.4% prevalence of borderline personality disorder, notes the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Symptoms are often defined by emotional dysregulation and difficulty with interpersonal relationships. Through treatment like dialectical behavioral therapy, you can begin to better control and manage your emotions and become mindful of triggers and how they affect your behavior, actions, and reactions.

Look at your mental health recovery plan for personality disorders like a task list to keep you in constant training outside of therapy, where you can add more notes, observations, and insights to keep you on point.

Mental Health Recovery Action Plan for Mood Disorders

Mood disorders — a condition predominated by a disconnect between your mindset and real life — also affect 9.7% of the U.S. population. Among major depression, bipolar disorder, or other co-occurring disorders (where mental health and substance abuse intermingle, such as depression and addiction), psychotherapy has been proven effective in treating all types of mood disorders, helping you recognize and change unhelpful thoughts, feelings, and actions.

In your mental health recovery action plan for mood disorders, you can track your symptoms, adjust medication if needed, and incorporate daily routines that stabilize your emotional state.

Working With a Therapist to Create a Mental Health Recovery Action Plan

Your WRAP is yours, created by you for your use. “The person who experiences symptoms is the one who develops their personal WRAP,” says NAMI. “The person may choose to have supporters and health care professionals help them create their WRAP.”

This main supporter is your mental health therapist. Your mental health recovery plan is a collaborative process with them and begins being crafted in the early stages of treatment. How does mental health treatment work? Here’s a timeline of what to expect:

Initial Assessment

An assessment is, ideally, your first session with a therapist. It’s a getting-to-know-you appointment where they’ll listen to your experiences and learn your story, evaluate your mental health history and challenges, both chronic and current, and your symptoms. This is an important session because the more information a counselor can gather, the better you can identify your long-term recovery goals. It also lays the groundwork for developing your mental health recovery plan.

Insurance Verification

Studies show that 31% of Americans believe that mental health care is financially out of reach and cost-prohibitive — just one reason why many people may forgo the benefits that therapy can offer. Thankfully, insurance coverage can make the difference between getting help for your symptoms or letting them worsen, which can have devastating impacts. Filling out this form allows the staff at our Puget Sound campus to verify your health insurance and determine what your provider will pay.

Making Your Mental Health Recovery Plan

“The first part of WRAP is developing a personal Wellness Toolbox,” says Dr. Mary Ellen Copeland, who developed and founded the wellness recovery action plan. “This is a list of resources you can use to develop your WRAP. It includes things like contacting friends and supporters, peer counseling, focusing exercises, relaxation and stress reduction exercises, journaling, creative, fun and affirming activity, exercise, diet, light, and getting a good night’s sleep.”

This is ultimately where therapy and treatment begin in earnest. Along with your therapist, you’ll start outlining specific steps, set measurable goals, and begin writing out your mental health recovery action plan. In subsequent sessions, new insights can become new revisions to your WRAP so you have actionable strategies that evolve as you do.

Aftercare Planning

When you think of the word aftercare, what comes to mind? A 2022 study posted by the Association for Psychological Science noted that 67% — nearly two-thirds — of people with a mental illness achieved symptomatic recovery. That doesn’t mean the book on mental health care is closed. Aftercare is essentially continued care when treatment (like an in-patient stay at a mental health facility) concludes. Y

Your therapist and support team can set you up with a schedule for additional therapy sessions or connect you with local support groups you can attend to keep yourself accountable and on-point with your recovery — where your mental health recovery plan becomes an essential resource to swear by.

What Is a Mental Health Recovery Action Plan Like?

Because mental health is the evolution of yourself and reframing of how your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors interact, an action plan for mental health needs to do the same. Yours might include some integral steps to support your day-to-day:

Daily Routine

By establishing consistent habits, you create a sense of stability and predictability in your life. This can be a new change when emotional dysregulation and erratic behaviors may have defined your mental illness. Whether it’s scheduling time for exercise, meal planning, or setting aside moments for mindfulness, a daily routine can anchor you.

“What do I need to do every day to stay as well as possible?” asks Dr. Copeland. “Which wellness tools do I need to use every single day? Maybe it’s taking a shower, maybe it’s eating three meals, maybe it’s avoiding sugar, maybe it’s avoiding flour, maybe it’s, ‘I need to spend at least an hour doing something that I love to do.’ Those basic things that you need to do every day to stay as well as possible.”

Identifying and Avoiding Triggers

Recognizing your triggers allows you to take steps to avoid or manage them, and your PTSD recovery plan or trauma recovery plan can include techniques to desensitize triggers that may arise in your travels. It’s more than a supplement to your WRAP’s daily routine section, but an organic list of pain points you can keep updated as you progress through therapy.

Copeland explains them as “those events or triggers that, if they happened, might make you feel worse — like an argument with a friend or getting a big bill. Then, using wellness tools, you develop an action plan you can use to get through this difficult time.”

Learning Coping Mechanisms

One of the most valuable components of mental health treatment — if not the most valuable — is the opportunity to develop and learn coping mechanisms for internal and external triggers. Whereas before, you might not be able to handle reality in the face of a triggering stimulus, with therapy and mental training, you’re armed with the skills and tools to manage your thoughts and emotions and navigate challenging situations. Learning these strategies takes your mental health recovery plan from a static list to an interactive guide that empowers you to face them head-on.

“List those signs that let you know you are feeling much worse like you are feeling very sad all the time or are hearing voices,” says Copeland. “And again, using your wellness toolbox, develop a powerful action plan that will help you feel better as quickly as possible and prevent an even more difficult time.”

Crisis Planning

You may be receiving treatment for anxiety disorder, where panic attacks are your crisis moment — or depression when you’ve had dark times of suicidal ideation. Your mental health recovery plan should include a clear crisis plan outlining the steps you need to take during these moments of acute distress.

“In the crisis plan, you identify those signs that let others know they need to take over responsibility for your care and decision making, who you want to take over for you and support you through this time, health care information, a plan for staying at home through this time, things others can do that would help and things they might choose to do that would not be helpful,” Copeland adds. “This kind of proactive advanced planning keeps you in control even when things seem out of control.”

What Are the Benefits of a Mental Health Recovery Action Plan?

A structured recovery plan gives you a plan, an agenda, on how to sustain your mental health journey. Dr. Copeland advises referring to your outline regularly, every day until it becomes second nature.

“In order to use this program successfully, you have to be willing to spend up to 15 or 20 minutes daily reviewing the pages and be willing to take action if indicated,” she says. “As you become familiar with your symptoms and plans, you will find that the review process takes less time and that you will know how to respond to certain symptoms without even referring to the book.”

Here’s how a wellness recovery action plan can benefit you:

Increased Self-Awareness

One big benefit of having an action plan for mental health is the tangible boost in self-awareness it provides you. By regularly reflecting on your progress and setbacks, watch how you become more attuned to your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors. It’s an enhanced self-awareness to proceed in life with more certainty than you may not have imagined possible pre-therapy,

Improved Coping Skills

A generic mental health recovery plan wouldn’t go very far in developing the personal coping skills you need for managing very personal signs, symptoms, and triggers. However, a personalized mental health recovery action plan imbues the skills you need to handle stress and setbacks. Over time, you’ll notice that the coping mechanisms you’ve learned become second nature.

Improved Emotional Regulation

People with borderline personality disorder and similar conditions face a large degree of emotional dysregulation. By recording this symptom in your WRAP, how you tend to react in triggered moments, and the coping skills therapy has given you, your ability to regulate your emotional reactions improves — a framework for managing and neutralizing intense feelings.

Improved Communication Skills

Crafting and discussing your recovery plan with a therapist (and loved ones, those who you may list in your contact section) play a role in boosting your communication skills. You’ll become better at expressing your needs, articulating your feelings, and setting boundaries, which are all critical for maintaining healthy relationships that may have been marred by disordered thinking. “If you are in a crisis situation, the book will help you discover that so you can let your supporters know they need you to take over,” says Copeland. “Distributing your crisis plan to your supporters and discussing it with them is absolutely essential to your safety and well-being.”

Personalization and Flexibility

Your recovery journey is nothing if not unique. One of the greatest strengths of your plan is its flexibility since it can be edited, modified, and tailored to what your needs are. Whether you’re following a trauma recovery plan or adjusting your strategies for a wellness recovery action plan, personalization ensures that your approach remains relevant and effective.

Decreased Symptoms of Mental Health Disorders

Ultimately, the goal of mental health treatment and a well-executed mental health recovery action plan at hand can improve the reduction in symptoms you may suffer from — solely because you’ve taken the incentive to document them and consciously work on them in your day-to-day life. Proactively managing triggers, adhering to a daily routine, and implementing effective coping strategies to better position yourself for lasting improvement.

Finding a Mental Health Treatment Facility

Working with a therapist is the heart of creating your mental health recovery action plan. You can get started by pursuing treatment that’s comprehensive — for mental health issues, that means finding a provider that offers individual and group therapy, specialized programming for conditions like anxiety, depression, or trauma, and aftercare options.

Royal Life Centers’ facility at Puget Sound is a place to begin that journey, where we offer a comprehensive and compassionate mix of evidence-based and holistic therapy that has seen many people conquer mental illness and live their best lives.

We understand you may have questions about the process, from intake to therapy and cost, so we’re here to provide answers. Curious about treatment? Don’t be afraid to make that one phone call that can change your life. Contact us today.

REFERENCES: