Son better after 7-day hospital stay, would like him to enroll in a NAMI Peer-to-Peer program

Family
1

I think my son’s improvement in the hospital was due to new experiences and seeing people like himself – basically not feeling so alone.

NAMI’s peer-to-peer program would seem like an ideal way to continue his recovery:

http://namimd.org/personal_support

Peer-to-Peer is a unique, experiential learning program for people with any serious mental illness who are interested in establishing and maintaining their wellness and recovery.

  • Peer-to-Peer consists of eight two-hour units and is taught by a team of two trained “Mentors” and a volunteer support person who are personally experienced at living well with mental illness.

  • Mentors are trained in an intensive three day training session and are supplied with teaching manuals.

  • Participants come away from the course with a binder of hand-out materials, as well as many other tangible resources: an advance directive; a “relapse prevention plan” to help identify tell-tale feelings, thoughts, behavior, or events that may warn of impending relapse and to organize for intervention; mindfulness exercises to help focus and calm thinking; and survival skills for working with providers and the general public.

This sounds so ideal! The only problem is that my son is not interested in it. Brushes off the idea with “doesn’t like Zoom”. How can I get him interested?

2

In a pre-Covid time, one of the mentors who was going to teach the Peer to Peer class that ran concurrent with the Family to Family class my husband and I attended, came to our home before the class started to meet our son in an attempt to interest him in the class.

The man had done it various time with a pretty good success record.

The teacher for Family to Family came with him, she had lunch with me while they spent time together.

I had told my son that the young man needed friends, which was also true, he was hoping to spend time with my son for his own social reasons as well, they had a lot of similar interests.

It didn’t work with my son, but it had worked many times before.

1 Like