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Every NHS
mental health trust should employ service users to promote recovery,
charity urges
September
14, 2009
by Angela Hussain
.........
Every
NHS mental health trust in Britain should employ service users to
promote the principles of mental health recovery to staff, a leading
charity has recommended.
Service users should run 'recovery
education centres' to help radically change mental health care within
trusts, says the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health.
Such recovery centres should also
train people who have had mental health problems to be ‘peer
professionals’. They should eventually provide 50 per cent
of all mental health care within each trust.
The Sainsbury centre's position
paper, entitled Implementing Recovery: Ten Key Organisational Changes
calls for a radical shake-up of mental health services where recovery
principles become woven into mental health care.
The recovery principles represent
a less-medical, more holistic and social approach to care and treatment.
Last year the Sainsbury centre published
Making
Recovery a Reality. It presented key principles behind the “empowering”
recovery approach and implications for services if they are to steer
away from a traditional medical model.
Professor Geoff Shepherd, a clinical
psychologist and visiting professor in the health service and population
research department at London's Institute of Psychiatry, said: "Implementing
recovery requires a major transformation in the culture of mental
health services.
"It
means supporting people to take much greater control over the way
that they are treated.
"It
means challenging stigma and discrimination much more assertively
in communities. And it requires mental health professionals to work
in a very different way to support service users’ own priorities
and their hopes for the future."
See also:
Service provision
......
What is recovery,
anyway?
From:
Kim Sherrington, lead clinician/unit manager, NHS mental health
trust, UK
Date:
September 17, 2009
Got no problem with this in theory and indeed will welcome anything
that challenges the corrupt pharma-led industry we have now. But
will someone please define 'recovery' - the govt equates it to getting
a job.
And
can we acknowledge that we created stigma in the first place with
our frightening language, labels and treatments. Therefore let's
sort out our own house rather than blame media and the public for
their stigmatising views.
........
I'll be a
peer professional
From:
Robert
Arthur, unemployed due to depression, Basingstoke. England
Date:
September 17, 2009
This is a very good idea. And I for one would be very willing to
train to be a peer professional. At the moment in Basingstoke where
I live there seems to be no thought or provision in this matter.
And I'm sure I'm not the only person who would benefit greatly from
a service of this description.
.......
Recovery
is a Trojan horse
From:
Louise Pembroke, survivor activist [not recovered], London
Date:
September 17, 2009
What would we promote as 'recovery' then? One US website written
by survivors states that recovery means having friends who are NOT
service users or providers. That stuffs my recovery then!
If you ask service users - [the kind of user who doesn't attend
conferences] what is their understanding of recovery is, they may
well reply all they've been taught by the voluntary and statutory
sectors which is recovery equals employment.
Then
we have a niche of 'recovery' trainers - including survivors who
promote varying 'levels' of recovery ranging from 'impaired' [slightly
sub-standard] through to going 'beyond recovery' to a place called
thriving where nothing gets you down, eureka!
I don't see this highly-sloganised bandwagon of recovery as the
holy grail, more of a Trojan horse. It's been politically hijacked
along with 'personalisation' to service welfare reforms which will
benefit councils and the voluntary sector, not service users. It's
been used by the statutory sector to get people in and out asap
and is used in such a way as to be bolted onto a medical model of
mental health, not challenge it. Survivors are not neccessarily
any better at defining recovery for others than a psychiatrist or
social worker. They also have to operate within a current culure
which dictates some version of the recovery is The Way and The Only
Way, with amazement if you don't agree.
Recovery
as it is currently espoused is as much of a tyranny as the medical
model and no less so just because a survivor says it. Before this
word was elevated to a god-like status, users/survivors did seek
to live our lives as well as we can, we did seek and promote self
management, anyone remember that?! Ditto, there have always been
people working in services who were and are holistic in the way
they work - the word recovery made no difference to them. I've never
seen a word so evangelised and misued as recovery. I'm anti-recovery.
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