They provide specialist trained counselling in Cornwall to those who have experienced abuse or domestic violence, regardless of gender, sexuality, age or income.
After signing up with the programme last year, I was finally allocated a counsellor at the end of 2021.
You can either refer yourself or refer someone you think could also benefit from this service.
Is counselling free?
You are assessed and put on a waiting list that is now slightly less than a year long. You are then offered 12 sessions, and you are asked to pay a small donation from session four upwards, which can be as little as £5 if you aren’t working or are on a low income.
The donation is discreet, so there is no need to worry about your counsellor or anyone else knowing how much you donated. Counselling is provided countywide via face to face, telephone, and video and is over seven days a week.
Referrals can be made via completing a short form on the website, texting or phoning and leaving a message, sending a message over WhatsApp, or messaging on any social media, including Twitter, Facebook, etc Instagram, and Snapchat.
Who to contact
Jo Stone the position WAVES Manager on 07815136743
This is the first-ever box I have reviewed, and being a thirty-something year old I found that the price was a little steep at £25 a month or £75 every three months, and that’s not including postage. Postage costs depend on the type of subscription you choose.
When opening Teen Calm’s Self-Care box, I picked out a card that I will be keeping on the office’s notice board. It’s a good idea to look at positive messages throughout the day.
The next thing to pull out is 54 ways to ease the anxious mind cards. My 10-year old niece and I will be looking at these more closely when we have our chill time in the cabin. Watch out for a blog post on these at a later date.
I then picked out Aromatherapy bath potion sea salt infused with a blend of pure essential oils. This is the perfect thing to use after a long day at school or work.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a bath, so a pity its not or bath and showers. My niece will be enjoying a long relaxing soak in a tub after forest school. I usually have showers to help me relax after a long day.
The handmade lavender soap was a lovely idea. The soap is made by a company called Grace’s Generation.
The worry doll was one of the best surprises as I’ve never seen or heard of these before. The story of the original Guatemalan worry people, apparently you put the doll under your pillow when you go to bed, and in the morning, your worries will disappear. Not sure it works, but I love the doll and the idea.
One of the best items inside the box has to be The Teenage Guide to Stress book, which briefly covers essential teenage issues such as friendships, exams, education, sex, depression, drink and drugs and eating disorders. If a book like this had been available when I was younger, I would have purchased it. I’m happy for my niece to read this as she needs to be aware of these life problems.
This book is available to purchase from £6.55 on Amazon.
The final item I picked out of the box was a pack of love hearts that I will share with my niece as a bit of a treat.
Teen Calm boxes are definitely great for teens as well as young adults. I would love to receive one of these from a family member or friend when I’m feeling low.
Teen Calm’s boxes make me smile as they are packed with full-size random products with fun, exciting new things to try.
I would also say you get more than your money’s worth in this box, and not many other packages have full-size products. These make lovely surprise gifts for pre-teens, teenagers or adults especially during lockdown or other stressful periods such as exams etc.
If you are reading this, but you don’t have a chronic illness or mental health. Self-Care is for absolutely anyone. Self-care is essential to practice daily.
Let us know if you or your teenagers practice self-care?
The CBT Good Habit Journal was the first book I read based on cognitive behaviour therapy.I received it for Christmas two years ago and have decided to share my thoughts and feelings on this.
CBT is a talking therapy that can help you change the ways in which you think to help you deal with overwhelming problems in a positive way by breaking down them down.
The exercises can make you think about your future and the goals you want to achieve in life.
I’m going to revisit CBT and fill in some of the challenging tasks within this book with my therapist. It will be interesting to see if my goals are the same as they were two years ago and in a year from now.
I have had 6 CBT sessions with Outlook SouthWest, but unfortunately, I felt more work was needed.
I also had a private counsellor who I used as recommended by my previous company healthcare plan. After I left the company, I continued to work with the same psychologist privately until she became ill.
My doctor contacted CMHS (The Community Mental Health Team), who also gave me six CAT therapy sessions before discharging me due to lack of funds, then again when I moved areas.
For those of you who are a bit unsure about CBT, I would suggest buying this book and working through the exercises alone or with a therapist.
I’m going to work with a therapist because I’m struggling to do some exercises alone.
I’m currently working on knowing myself and looking at how I think and learning different ways to cope with these thoughts.
Keeping a journal is a great way to express your thoughts and feelings and to get to know yourself better.
Getting your thoughts and goals down on paper helps release stress, solve problems, and turn those dreams into reality.
Since using The CBT Good Habit Journal, I’ve learnt how to communicate and look at things differently. I’ve also engaging better with CBT this time around than previously.
It can take a while to sink in as habits are often grained deep inside the mind from a young age.
This journal has made me think carefully about how I come across and how I can be a better version of myself, and how I can interact and think differently.
Its important to keep moving your mental health forward as the country stands still with daily routines are disrupted due to COVID.
In the world prior to the pandemic, we were each in our routine, consistently doing the same actions .
Going to work, meeting friends, and doing the things important to maintaining our mental health (that might have been exercise, meditation etc).
As creatures of habit, when we find something that does a reasonable job, we tend to stick with it, even if it’s not the best possible option.
This is what marketing people call ‘satisficing’; where we take the first thing that we deem to be satisfactory for the problem we face, and we run with it.
With so many changes to our daily living, and a huge increase in time spent at home, the normal routine has been blown out of the water.
But what this does give us, if we use it wisely, is time and space to explore.
There will almost certainly be things you wouldn’t dream of giving up.
It could be that your morning meditation sets you up for a productive day, or an evening run helps you to clear your mind.
There is no need to drop them, but there is a chance to discover new options that ordinarily you wouldn’t have imagined.
As with anything new, it can be a little scary – new people, new environments, new things to learn, all of which can make experimenting with new things more daunting.
The best part of our current circumstances is almost every business has had to move online, or at least provide some form of online service.
This means you are free to try as many new things as you want from the comfort of your own home.
This is an opportunity to really go and explore as many different tools, approaches and methods to help you feel as good as you possibly can.
Although you can’t control the world on the outside, now is the time to optimise your world on the inside.
Have you thought dancing could be the energy and morale booster you’d love but have never quite made a class?
Have you heard arts and crafts help people to feel calm and grounded but didn’t quite get the equipment you needed to get started?
Or maybe you’ve wanted to stick to a 30 day yoga series but life kept getting in the way.
Regardless of the obstacles that prevented it in the past, if you act quickly, you can use this time to begin exploring new possibilities for how you can boost your mood and your body.
As well as pushing past the ‘satisficing’ barrier to discover alternative ways of keeping yourself feeling good, it also provides novel and interesting experiences.
So you get to find what feels good for you, while keeping yourself busy and your brain stimulated.
To get you started, all you need is to sit down with a pen and paper, and brainstorm as many ideas as you can.
Be creative, be unrealistic to start with, let your imagination run wild. As you do you’ll open yourself up to new thinking, and different, more practical ideas will flow towards you.
Once you’ve made your list, prioritise the most intriguing, and create a plan to start experimenting.
If one thing is for sure, you’ll be able to look back on this period and see it as the catalyst to moving your mental health forwards.
So as we approach the one year anniversary of almost constant disruption and uncertainty, we can all be forgiven for having some dips in our mental health.
Human beings are creatures of habit, and we really enjoy the feeling of certainty; from knowing you’ve bought the right house to picking your perfect life partner, that feeling of certainty helps us feel safe and comfortable.
How to keep moving your mental health forward
This is an opportunity to really go and explore as many different tools, approaches and methods to help you feel as good as you possibly can.
Although you can’t control the world on the outside, now is the time to optimise your world on the inside.
Have you thought dancing could be the energy and morale booster you’d love but have never quite made a class?
Have you heard arts and crafts help people to feel calm and grounded but didn’t quite get the equipment you needed to get started?
Or maybe you’ve wanted to stick to a 30 day yoga series but life kept getting in the way.
Regardless of the obstacles that prevented it in the past, if you act quickly, you can use this time to begin exploring new possibilities for how you can boost your mood and your body.
As well as pushing past the ‘satisficing’ barrier to discover alternative ways of keeping yourself feeling good, it also provides novel and interesting experiences.
So you get to find what feels good for you, while keeping yourself busy and your brain stimulated.
To get you started, all you need is to sit down with a pen and paper, and brainstorm as many ideas as you can.
Be creative, be unrealistic to start with, let your imagination run wild.
As you do you’ll open yourself up to new thinking, and different, more practical ideas will flow towards you.
Once you’ve made your list, prioritise the most intriguing, and create a plan to start experimenting.
If one thing is for sure, you’ll be able to look back on this period and see it as the catalyst to moving your mental health forwards.
Let us know how your mental health has been moving forward during the pandemic and lockdown?
Have you taken up any new hobbies or gone back to an old hobby?
I spent years trying to avoid taking antidepressants, in September 2013 things became so bad that I had no choice.
I went to the doctors after being suspended from my job and falling out with my friends. I was a total mess and wanted to end it all.
I can’t remember how I ended up at the doctor’s, but somehow I managed to walk for a whole hour to get to the surgery.
I was lucky enough to have a friendly female locum who prescribed me Sertraline and asked me to come back and see her in a few day’s time.
Sertraline is an antidepressant in a group of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
The pill is used to treat, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD).
I didn’t want to go on tablets, and for years I have been struggling with highs and lows thinking they would just disappear and I can find my happy ending story.
I previously took St Johns worts when things got really bad, just after my 21st birthday.
St Johns Worts are a natural herbal remedy, used for mild to moderate depression.
I found them ok at the time, to the extent where I could stop crying, but they are certainly no cure.
When I first started taking antidepressants called sertraline, I had horrendous side effects including sickness and a bad stomach, but this settled down within a few days.
I was also offered CBT first at a lower level, and after a few sessions of talking, I was moved up a step to receiving higher intensity CBT, which is more in-depth sessions.
After completing my CBT sessions, I found that the sertraline and CBT sessions hadn’t even touched what was going on in my head, I even had a couple of counseling sessions with a private counsellor who deals with Bupa patients.
In March 2014 I hit rock bottom again when my Dad had a heart attack in January, I had fallen out with someone who I thought was my friend after receiving the news that my mum had a mass on her kidney and that she would have to have her kidney taken out.
This time the doctor prescribed more antidepressants this time Prozac another SSRI was used to treat depression.
He gave me a prescription in case I needed it but told me I need to stop taking pills and just get on with life.
By the beginning of February 2015, I was at the doctor’s again, and this time I was put on the mental health team as I was worse than ever.
The mental health team took months to access me and when they did they got my notes mixed up.
I was on the mental health team for over a year, and I have just been released from the team after 11 CAT sessions and no proper diagnosis.
They said I have Adjustment disorder, which according to Wikipedia and other sources is a stress-related illness to life events and lasts no longer than six months – Anxiety and Personality disorder.
A personality disorder is also often mixed up with Bipolar 2, which they said they couldn’t rule out!
I’ve now been told that I have to try more Outlook South West lower level therapies because of NHS funding.
I’m tempted to get another opinion from a private therapist because I’m angry about the way I have been treated.
I have had this illness for years, even throughout my school days there was always something different, the boredom, the angst, the tearaway. It wasn’t for attention or fear of abandonment(which is what Borderline Personality patients are known for) because I often felt like a bubble being protected because I was trapped, with so many expectations almost celebrity-like.
It wasn’t even life-related, at times life appeared to be ok, but I still felt like there was something missing.
At times there were lots of people around me I wanted to scream let me out! I hated the spotlight yet I hated being hated!
Has anyone else had similar problems with antidepressants or getting a diagnosis?
Perhaps you have been misdiagnosed?
I’ve kept this inside for ages and now feel the time is right to let my voice be heard!
I refuse to become another statistic shutting up and hiding away from society.
