Hi, I’m Maya Stein and I’m the Occupational Therapist that works in the crisis shelter at Covenant House with youth experiencing homelessness. And today I’m here to talk about the connection between mental health and youth homelessness.
Many of the youth staying with us experience anxiety and depression and have come from places of trauma in their past, as well as the experience of becoming homeless is a trauma in itself.
An essential life skill that we all learn or need to learn is how we can support ourselves and how we can bring self-care into our daily lives, which is very important for supporting our mental health. Many of the youth who are staying with us have incorporated self-care plans and goals as part of their stay here.
To start, let me explain Occupational Therapy. I explain it to our youth as I help people to occupy their time in a meaningful way. Many of the youth and young people who have come to stay with us are in survival mode. They are experiencing homelessness, sometimes for the first time, and they’ve lost a sense of purpose and identity. And my role is to support them in finding a new path or continuing on a path that they had before. And that means connecting them with meaningful activities in their daily life, if that’s following their plan or doing things for fun and taking care of themselves, those all contribute to their sense of well-being and mental health.
So as an Occupational Therapist I try to do what we do best and go back to the frameworks that we learned and think about self-care, productivity, leisure, and how I can support our young people to build capacity in their life and build routine into their everyday life so that they’re able to engage in these important activities. I think we often take routine for granted and that is a huge part of what I work on our young people, is supporting daily routines to support their mental health.
