We used the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale to measure whether the programme led to improvements in mental wellbeing for those who completed the programme.
SWEMWB is today one of the standard tools for measuring mental wellbeing and its credentials as a robust and rigorous statistical tool have been well established.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/research/platform/wemwbs/
https://www.corc.uk.net/outcome-experience-measures/short-warwick-edinburgh-mental-wellbeing-scale/
The SWEMWB results for the Weymouth run of RYS were:
- 16 users completed the 12 week programme
- 93% of those completing the programme underwent statistically significant positive change in their mental wellbeing as a result of the programme
- 14.3% of those completing the programme went from low mental wellbeing to high mental wellbeing
- 57.1% went from low mental wellbeing to moderate mental wellbeing
- 100% who started with a moderate mental wellbeing score (28%) significantly improved their wellbeing score over the course of the programme
We also used a self-assessment form to get qualitative information on the users experience of the programme. Here are some of the comments.
Weymouth, Autumn 2019, Testimonials:
“If you are ready for a powerful and inspiring experience which will challenge you to look again at how your difficulties may be impacting your mental health, then this course led passionately by Chris Jury is an exciting opportunity. With his wealth of experience and knowledge Chris uses script writing, psychology and philosophy as an innovative way of helping you work through personal problems in a supportive group environment. The group I was supporting found it to be stimulating, exciting and rewarding, and Chris’s dedication to the individual members went above and beyond their expectations.”
SC, Mental Health Practitioner
“I didn’t know what to expect when I signed up for the course. I was undergoing problems in my personal life and recent events had left me emotionally confused and I was worried that I might descend into a bout of anxiety and depression as I had on previous occasions. I had often used writing in the past as a way of helping get my head straight during times of emotional crisis. So, hoping that this course might help, I took my scrambled brain along to the library for the last 12 Tuesdays.
Well! I am so glad that I signed up. It has been 12 weeks of interesting, well informed and excellently presented tutorials about life, the universe and everything. Chris has obviously spent his life researching and accumulating all sorts of interesting and useful knowledge about the human mind and condition and has now kindly shared it with us. He did this in a very sensitive but entertaining way, keeping our attention at all times while we took in vast amounts of information without realising.
The course has allowed us to explore our own and other course members’ particular problems and work out ways to overcome the affect that they have on our life so that we are better able to deal with whatever comes our way in the future. This is facilitated, also, by the use of storytelling. This somehow (almost magically) helps us to channel some of our hopes and fears through the discipline of writing ,in a prescribed format, a premise for a story to be written in script form. Who would have thought it?!
During all our soul searching and discussions, Chris demonstrated a huge knowledge and understanding of people’s predicaments and throughout the course there was a lovely Mental Healthcare Professional to intervene and lend her expertise when required.
I would recommend this course to anyone who needs to get their brain and emotional life in order. Actually I think I already have!”
AR, Service User Weymouth
“I was rather apprehensive about attending the Rewriting Your Script course but I needn’t have been! Chris is funny, driven, accommodating and absolutely determined to help each individual with any mental well-being concern. Take your pen, a notepad, your honesty and a willingness to put in some effort. You will be rewarded with a better understanding of your world and self – and maybe make some new friends in the process. I wish I’d had access to a course like this decades ago!”
PMW, Service User Weymouth
“I just want to say Thank You from the bottom of my heart for these past 12 weeks. You have been amazing in every way and have helped me (and I know, others) enormously.
I am very sad that our Mondays have finished, and I know it is going to be hard to reconcile that I am no longer going to Weymouth Library every week to sit and learn and absorb and realise so very many things.
I think what really helped these past weeks is that you are “real” – you have been where many of us are, and come through an awful lot, and in realising that you are not perfect and accepting who you are and allowing us to learn this also through tears and laughter and a good few “light bulb” moments – has been an amazing experience.
I never thought I would meet new friends, and I never thought I would get as much out of this experience as I have done – and you have helped me greatly….so, thank you.”
GL, Service User Weymouth
“I now need time to assimilate all the information and clarity I’ve received from the course, and to put it into action. Action having been the centre of attention for the last 12 weeks, connecting it to values and overarching themes in a way I’ve never understood before. Very welcome clarity. It’s been a delight and a healthy and positive challenge!”
ARY, Service User Weymouth
“A very valuable and entertaining 12 weeks.”
MO, Service User Weymouth
“Thank you so much for helping me on my life journey and for teaching me how to write a script.”
DP, Service User Weymouth
“Chris’s willingness to go the extra mile by giving extra feedback and online support is really great and lends an authenticity to the therapy.”
SF, Service User Weymouth
“The support from the rest of the group and their perspective on my main issue and the huge amount of guilt that has bogged down my brain for years, has been incredibly liberating and therapeutic in itself. And the teaching which has been extraordinarily stimulating has changed so much of my perspective in an amazing way. I feel incredibly fortunate and definitely soooooo much healthier mentally to have done this course and to have been taught by Chris.”
DO, Service User Weymouth
“This programme has exceeded my expectations! I have learnt so much about myself and how to accept who I am and that I do matter and that I have a strong survival instinct and to be with a group of people who truly accept you as you are is brilliant. Chris has been amazing, interesting, caring and makes us all feel that he really wants to help and the process of learning how to write a script has been intensely interesting. I have loved this course and am so sad it is ending.”
GY, Service User Weymouth
“We were offered gold dust in Chris’s skills, expertise and experience. His challenges through the process of script writing have brought me a far greater clarity in terms of what my values are.”
AN, Service User Weymouth
“My biggest problem, the ‘thing’ I desperately wanted to resolve has been revealed, faced up to, challenged and overcome thanks to Chris and this course. I have been in therapy for almost a decade (all different approaches; CBT, Systemic, Transactional Analysis. and Transpersonal). This course has gone deeper and quicker and been more transformative than anything I have done in the previous decade. The script technique that Chris takes you through enables you to step out of your locked-in way of thinking, out of repeated patterns of thought and behaviours, out of the washing machine head – an endless cycle of stuckness – and galvanises you into DOING. Through the doing of the script you begin doing the changes that transform your life.”
HO, Service User Weymouth
“Thank you so much for the truth and clarity!”
SA, Service User Weymouth
Changing Stories 