Mya's Balance

Mya’s balance of activities and physical activities relies heavily on self-care, spending more time engaged in passive leisure with a little socializing on the telephone with family occasionally. Her activity revolves around self-care, illness management, church and trying to keep engaged with family. She may be good at caring for her physical care needs in the way of hygiene; her social needs at unmet as she spends a lot of her time alone. Mya also spends a lot of time at home, ruminating on her bed which gives her little structure and unhealthy routines. This can lead to poor sleep hygiene, if it is not already effecting her sleep (Canadian Sleep Society, 2004). Mya’s only structure and routine comes from church and health care attendance.
Mya primary satisfaction currently comes from church and talking to her family on the telephone. She finds it hard to engage socially,
especially in direct physical contact and current social interactions are church, family and health care team. She finds herself angry with the wasted time and feels especially lonely on weekends boosting her confidence could help her engage more socially by focusing on positive things. Mya expresses very low satisfaction with her activity levels at the moment. Moving forward we would ask Mya if she would feel comfortable filling out the assessments and working together to increase her activity levels. To ensure that she doesn’t feel discouraged by her low activity levels, we would emphasize her successes: keeping in contact with family, adhering to her medication regimen, keeping her appointments with her case manager and MH team, attending church services, etc.... – and also emphasize the positive feelings associated with her social interactions, and when partaking in her hobbies: sewing and computers. Mya should focus on the activities that give her the best satisfaction and increase them, like attending church once a week rather than twice a month where she could make new friends easily.
Mya’s access to community environments is extremely limited to health care teams and church attendance. While she has limited access, going to church twice a month being more physical attendance without direct social interaction, it still provides improvement on well-being (Krupa, 2010). She is shy, quiet and finds it difficult to visit the grocery stores. Mya could try going clothes shopping, which may increase her enjoyment of being in public spaces or at least make it tolerable.
People with mental illness should be compared by using the time use of retired Canadians (Krupa, et al.
2010). Mya spends a lot of time in self-care, passive leisure and some resting. She may have some productivity if she engages in home maintenance (resource 2.2). Interpretation of engagement levels: Mya has some engagement, however most is passive leisure. Helping her to find ways where she can increase passive to more active leisure will increase her engagement in what she already does. Mya has expressed feeling of needing to be more productive and enjoys her church attendance, maybe using these tools to help her to be more actively engaged such as volunteering through her church or finding English classes for her to attend. Action over Inertia offers suggestions that are designed to promote empowerment through small, easily accomplished micro-activity changes (Krupa, 2010). Our activity plan should also address the fact that she is not eating well. Perhaps there is a program offered in a group setting that teaches good nutrition habits with the added benefit of social
interaction.