The Recovery Movement (part 1)

The current fashion for the Recovery approach in mental health, means it is inevitable that it will feature in many of these blogs. I am, in part, a product of it myself, having been a client of one of the services which uses it, however I am also one of its critics. I don’t believe that the turnaround in my own mental health over the last four years or so can be attributed to the ideas and practices that Recovery-focused practitioners use.

Most people approach Recovery from an individual perspective - a worthwhile personal experience leads them to recommend it to others. I, on the other hand, have always seen it as a social movement within the world of mental health (hence the capital R).

The easiest way to introduce the subject is to signpost to short documents from individuals and organisations using the approach from here in Devon and the rest of the UK - I’ll leave the large number of connections to it in the US, NZ and Australia until part two (A brief history of Recovery).

In essence the Recovery movement has sort to change the way mental health services are organised and delivered in order to be more responsive to the stated needs of clients and their supporters. A set of ethical, moral and political values has emerged which are intended to inform the personal conduct of workers in their interactions with clients. To date, the movement has not generated any new theory of human behaviour or understanding of mental distress, nor has it advocated specific therapeutic interventions, and as such has not challenged the legitimacy of any of the occupational groups within the world of mental health.

A good starting point is the list of Recovery - concepts and applications devised by a group of commissioners, providers, service users and carers from Devon in 2008 and collated by Laurie Davidson http://www.scmh.org.uk/pdfs/recovery_concepts.pdf (There were originally eleven, not ten items - but that will be the subject of a future post!) The concepts were then used to inform the writing of Making Recovery A Reality published by the Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health http://www.scmh.org.uk/pdfs/Making_recovery_a_reality_policy_paper.pdf They were also reworked into a simpler form for the pamphlet Putting Recovery at the heart of all we do issued to all employees of Devon Partner NHS Trust http://www.devonpartnership.nhs.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/info/Putting_Recovery_at_the_heart_of_all_we_do.pdf In 2009 the SCMH issued Position Paper - Implementing Recovery: A new framework for organisational change http://www.scmh.org.uk/pdfs/implementing_recovery_paper.pdf laying out specific proposals from which standards and outcomes could be set. Finally, the Recovery movement, client-centred as it is, offers the user‘s own ‘story’ as the principal form of evidence for Recovery. A recent example Beyond the Storms: Reflections on Personal Recovery in Devon http://www.devonpartnership.nhs.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/Beyond_the_Storms.pdf edited by Laurie Davidson and Linden Lynn.