Residents invited to take part in mental wellness workshops

Alberta Health Services invites local residents to attend a series of mental wellness workshops designed to teach coping strategies and maximize wellness and resiliency for themselves and others.

Addiction and Mental Health staff with Alberta Health Services (AHS) are leading five free workshops. Open to everyone, the workshops are will teach participants about coping strategies for mental wellness; to enhance their understanding of addiction and mental health challenges; and to show how to support someone who is struggling. Each workshop focuses on one of five topics: anxiety, maintaining healthy relationships, depression, managing difficult emotions and understanding addictions.

Workshops are every two weeks on Tuesday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., cycling through all five topics over a 10-week period; then repeating.

The anxiety workshop offers education about identifying and managing anxiety, while providing practical approaches to dealing with the symptoms. The maintaining healthy relationships workshop helps participants improve communication skills and boundary setting. The depression workshop focuses on the basics of depression, including symptoms, and highlights coping skills. The managing difficult emotions workshop helps individuals learn basic strategies around emotional awareness and healthy expression. The understanding addictions workshop helps people identify and support someone coping with addictions.

Feedback from previous workshop participants has been used to help improve addiction and mental health services in the community.

The upcoming session on Oct. 30 will focus on anxiety. Registration is required and participants are welcome to attend some or all of the workshops. Please call 780-594-7556 for more information or to register. Sessions are held in the Addictions Office, 5013 51 St.

In Cold Lake, call 780-594-7556 for addiction services, and 780-639-4922 for mental health services. AHS also provides telephone support 24/7 through the Mental Health Helpline at
1-877-303-2642, the Addiction Helpline at 1-866-332-2322, and Health Link at 811.