What Is A Care Guide?

1 in 5 adults suffer from mental illness, with even more struggling with one of the many at some point in their lives. Due to stigma and symptoms, many people face difficulty managing, keeping track of, and talking about their diseases.

A Care Guide is how you can list your history, symptoms and helpful options for both your own needs and for the reference of loved ones or medical professionals. When you find yourself struggling, it’s a way to refer back and remember skills that you’ve developed over time. Sharing the guide helps the people around you better understand and help you when needed. I created this for the many people who work so hard every day to destigmatize mental health issues, and to make discussing hard issues with your loved ones easier. In analyzing many mental health tech options I found that many people found them overly complex and just wanted something simple they could create themselves.

At the moment, the care guide is a downloadable and customizable Word template you can fill out for your own needs. I hope to eventually turn this into a webform so that users can easily create a more colorful document to keep on hand.