Empowering Healthy Connections: You’re Helping Mental Health Patients Build Safer Relationships

Did you know that individuals living with mental health challenges are often at a higher risk for unhealthy behaviours and relationships? Without the right support, these behaviours can lead to negative health outcomes. However, early intervention and preventative care in a safe, supportive environment can help promote healthier lifestyles.

Your Support Creates Real Change

Thanks to your generosity, three recreation coordinators recently completed specialized training to facilitate workshops about health and sexuality for inpatients of Victoria Hospital’s Mental Health program.

This wasn’t just classroom learning; the training provided staff with the theoretical approach, tools, and practical activities needed to lead group workshops focused on building healthy relationships. The training enabled the recreation coordinators to develop further resources and specific Victoria Hospital programming around sexuality, boundaries, safety, and reducing barriers and stigma.

Kurt Pay, Director of Mental Health Services, emphasizes why this matters:

“This training provided new tools, tips, and resources to help staff facilitate conversations with patients. Every patient responds differently to information that’s being provided to them, so having different tools and techniques to facilitate conversations means that we can really impact the care patients receive.”

Healing in a Safe Space

For many patients, the hospital is a place where they feel safe enough to address past trauma. By facilitating these workshops on the unit, the recreation coordinators can provide early intervention and preventative care. They work closely with patients, enabling staff to identify and address specific needs in either a one-to-one or small-group setting.

These recreational therapies help patients recognize that they are deserving of healthy relationships, teach them how to identify and leave abusive or manipulative situations, and teach them how to establish healthy boundaries.

“Our patients have unique challenges, including pre-lived trauma,” says Kurt Pay. “While patients are in the safe and supportive environment of the hospital, there’s an opportunity to help them start working through those past traumas and the relationship challenges they are currently experiencing.”

Training in Action

Since the programming launched last spring, your generosity has been at work on the units every single day.

Various workshops have been developed, and by applying the theory, concepts, and tools learned, staff are able to use inclusive language for all genders, body types, and power dynamics within relationships.

They’ve incorporated different ways to approach topics that have traditionally been taboo and engage individuals from adults to geriatrics with a low-barrier, low-stigma way of sharing potentially life-altering information.

The workshops have seen great engagement—patients work together, ask inquisitive questions, learn how to recognize and take accountability for their own patterns, and have great discussions with other patients in the group. Resource distribution is also an important aspect of the workshops, creating a space to share community resources that patients can access after discharge.