“Healing, Education and Recovery Of Emotional Strength.”
HEROES Programme Ltd was founded to support expansion and reach of The HEROES Groupwork Programme, the service that Miranda created in lockdown.
The HEROES Groupwork Programme is an educational course of therapeutic treatment (20 hours over 8 weeks). We offer a holistic, recovery-focused and trauma-informed approach to mental health recovery.
The HEROES mission is to support students to shine a light on, and shift, the limiting beliefs they have created about themselves and their identity, in response to the trauma they have encountered in their lives. The Programme works to hold a safe space for all members to build a better relationship with themselves and the world around them, for effective healing to occur.
HEROES has been developed, honed and piloted through the BHR Primary Care Network (HATCH LCP) over the past 3 years, with phenomenal outcomes. Due to the success of the model, which is now well established throughout the BHR PCN, we now want to expand reach.
The core aim of our CIC is to enable us to reach as many people who are suffering as possible, and support transformation of services for people with complex mental health needs.
HEROES was developed from our founder Miranda’s lived experience of Complex PTSD due to prolonged childhood trauma and abuse. She now lives in recovery from this label due to the teachings she has placed within the programme.
HEROES = ‘Healing, Education and Recovery Of Emotional Strength’.
“We want to create a movement, not just a treatment.”
“Trauma requires community to heal.”
Our aim within HEROES is to never ‘discharge’ a patient, and for them to be able to go on accessing support, teachings, and resources following graduating from the programme for as long as they like.
This is because we do not believe that mental health recovery is linear, with an ‘end point’ to get to, where patients are suddenly ‘fixed’. We believe that recovery is a process, a journey, and a collaborative one at that. The online network that we are currently looking to build (and have recently applied for local funding to produce) will allow us to keep our patients held in a safe, compassionate container for them to continue their recovery journeys through. We will be able to keep encouraging and connecting with our patients, and for them to carry on connecting with each other swiftly and easily rather than ‘stepping in, helping and then stepping out’.
We want to create fresh mental health services for people who require long-lasting support, eg people who weren’t brought up with secure attachment.
Currently, the majority of services on offer for people with complex mental health needs do not offer an indefinite support model. There is an ‘end’ in sight to most treatment packages. Within HEROES we work with an ethos within which we radically believe that mental health healing cannot be complete until we support and witness the healing of others. This is why we believe in building community, the power of human connection and bringing people TOGETHER to heal. We are advocates for groupwork, especially for people who have complex trauma at the root of their mental health difficulties.
The online network and community we are looking to co-produce together with patients who have already been through HEROES, will ensure that no one is left on their own following coming through the programme.
Miranda was a ‘service user’ within the mainstream mental health system for many years, finding 1:1 ‘treatments’ often re-traumatising, disempowering and perceived to be painful when they came to an ‘end.’ This idea for a wider scale model where we can bring through maintaining connection, patients supporting each other and being fed through new teachings etc was born from wanting to create a solution to help people who have lived their lives in suffering.
Within the network we want to also feed through opportunities for previous patients to be involved in pilots of the future levels of HEROES, which are currently in development. This will enable our services to continue being co-produced with lived experience at the core.
Keep an eye out on Miranda’s social media channels for news about the build of the network and expansion of this programme!
Miranda Arieh 