The Self Care for Mental Health website includes the Nourish and Flourish guide and resources for anyone facilitating health and wellbeing conversations with mental health clients or working in community-based mental health support programs.
The Nourish and Flourish conversation guides promote health through nutrition and physical activity while fostering connections to mental wellbeing. Unlike typical health resources, these guides incorporate client-created messaging: their own words and thoughts relevant to their lived experiences, challenges, and successes.
Forty community mental health support program clients participated in a “PhotoVoice” project to create this tailored educational resource that includes key health messages important to the individuals using the guides. The project identified themes from client photographs and stories including food access, community connections, holistic health, and physical activity. These common themes were then used to create the guides.
The conversation guides can be used by mental health support staff to help start conversations about different topics focused on health and nutrition to enable clients to practice healthy lifestyles and make small behavioral changes.
Setting goals that foster change
The guides help staff develop motivational interviewing techniques that reveal nonjudgmental, trauma-informed messages. Motivational interviewing is a directed conversation that guides and empowers the interviewee to define their own meaning, importance, and capacity for change. Participants are encouraged to focus their conversations on a goal the client wants to set and explore how they might achieve it.
The staff's role is to facilitate conversation, listen, and collaborate without judgment. Staff incorporate personal knowledge about motivational interviewing to elicit change and deepen relationships with clients.
These conversations can provide an opportunity to emphasize healthy behaviors that clients already engage in by celebrating and building on current momentum.
Conversation topics:
- Food choices
- Cooking at home
- Physical activity
- Nature — how being outside enhances wellbeing
- Mindful eating — paying attention to hunger and fullness cues
- Creativity as a way to relax the mind and body
- Holistic health
Visit the PhotoVoice Gallery website for more information on the project, and to view participants' photos and read their stories.
Reviewed in 2024