…empowering and educating people with mental illness

	News to Note...
	This year, PRPSN has graduated 45 individuals from its Peer Supporter Training series.  This three-week program helps prepare individuals for work as peer coaches and advocates at mental health programs. For information on future training opportunities, please call 323-346-0960.

Introduction

Along with its services, Project Return Peer Support Network – the self-help network we sponsor – offers training to help people with mental illness take greater charge of their own recovery. Even with strong advocacy and support groups available to assist people with mental illness, PRPSN believes that it is important for individuals to gain a belief in themselves and to develop the ability to assert themselves.

Training Topics

• Peer Supporter Training :
  PRPSN offers an intensive series for individuals interested in working as peer supporters or coaches in the mental health field. Held over a three-week period, the series covers mental health support and recovery techniques, medications and side effects, and response to medical emergencies. It includes topics such as the history and roles of peer supporters, advocating for others, group facilitation and success in the workplace.
  
  
• Advance Health Care Directives
  The training provides information and resource materials about advance directives, legal documents for expressing choices about treatment when individuals are unable to make decisions. PRPSN explains psychiatric advance directives and helps interested individuals complete documents, using templates prepared by Protection and Advocacy, Inc., a California nonprofit organization that works to protect the rights of people with disabilities.

• Self-Advocacy
  In this workshop, PRPSN helps individuals develop skills and knowledge to speak out for themselves in areas of daily life. The training covers experiences many people with mental illness face, such as housing rights, treatment issues and going back to work.

• Wellness Recovery Action Plan
  PRPSN helps individuals learn how to use self-help skills to deal with mental illness symptoms and to incorporate these skills into daily life. In this approach, developed by a national self-help advocate, individuals put together self-care plans that include daily maintenance lists, early warning signs and crisis planning.

• Procovery
  PRPSN introduces individuals to Procovery, an approach to help individuals move forward with a focus on a full life and not on illness. Procovery, developed by the Health Action Network, uses support groups and strategies to create and support change, gather support, find a purpose, and stick with Procovery during difficult times.

Training Information

PRPSN trainings are free to people with mental illness and to nonprofit or public mental health organizations that want to organize a training for the people they serve. To learn more, please contact:

Catherine Bond, M.A., Acting Director
Project Return Peer Support Network
6055 Washington Blvd., Suite 900
commerce, CA 90040
323-346-0960, ext. 222
cbond@mhala.org