How can a Mental Health Occupational Therapist help?
Ever found it hard to just do the simple things in life? Like get up, brush your teeth, have breakfast? By the time you get to work, you feel like you need to go home and have a break?
This could happen for a number of reasons. If you know it’s because you had a good night out, you might know that things will change and get better once your hangover heals.
But in the event that you have been experiencing this for years, you don’t know why or how things got so hard and you could be happy and still have problems with putting your keys in the freezer, perhaps Mental Health Occupational Therapy could be useful.
You may have heard of the saying ‘there’s more than one way to cut an apple’. You could cut it with a laser, craft knife, by 1/4s or 3rds etc. Occupational Therapists look at daily tasks the same way - multiple ways. This can be useful when trying to help people achieve their goals. For example, University is 2km away from your house, will you bike, walk, call an uber, drive your car, ask dad for a lift, skateboard…you’ve got the idea. So it’s likely you do use some Occupational Therapy thinking in your daily life anyway.
But what if suddenly it gets complicated, you woke up late? There are roadworks, you have an injury or you come a culture where you are not to walk on your own because you are a girl?
Suddenly, common sense ain’t so common.
Occupational Therapists are trained to see things from many different angles. We have models and varies ways to categorize a person’s reason for doing things, what they do and where they do it. Our ability to analyse a person, task and environment is our main science. We use this knowledge to help reframe what a person does to make it meaningful, increasing the quality of a person’s life.
When a person is not able to use common problem solving to overcome an obstacle, Occupational Therapists can usually help.
At a macro level, we think about culture, institutional rules, laws, geographic locations, political climate etc when considering a daily situations someone is experiencing. We are looking at how these things in a person’s environment might be helping or hindering someone in their daily goal.
At a micro level, we are not only thinking about a person’s mind, feelings and bodily sensations, we are also trained to think about the neurological and physiological engagement for a person with a task. Sometimes down to the names of neurotransmitters that are released with particular tasks and their effect on the person’s experience.
This is where Mental Health Occupational Therapists can be useful to people with neurodivergent traits.
Neurodivergence is any type of neurological development that deviates from the neurotypical norm of the general population. It usually shows up when it takes us longer to do things that others find so much easier. For example, getting up on time and having a morning routine to get to work, engaging in a long meeting or knowing when it is appropriate to speak. Having difficulty with these things can lead to a stressful life, high anxiety and then low mood which could happen when your body is trying to recover from the effort.
When considering a person from a neurodevelopment perspective, it means that we can look for other reasons for a person’s behavior or task choice. A person who is late constantly to work might be assumed to be disrespectful of other people’s time and sometimes labelled as arrogant or selfish. But what if they are late because they haven’t been able to figure out how long it takes to put their make up on, brush their teeth, overcome the physical pain experienced when showering?
So why should you join us?
People who have a similar neurotype tend to communicate more freely with each other, are more relaxed and spend more time on generating ideas and content. No one thinks twice about a person oversharing or accidentally getting the timing wrong and talking over someone, no one is assuming what you are thinking. As neurodivergent people we are just expecting this to happen and so there is more grace and acceptance among us. This means lots more laughing together.