Partnering For Recovery In Mental Health

Partnering for Recovery in Mental Health is a practical guide for conducting person and family-centered recovery planning with individuals with serious mental illnesses and their families. It is derived from the authors’ extensive experience in articulating and implementing recovery-oriented practice and has been tested with roughly 3,000 providers who work in the field as well as with numerous post-graduate trainees in psychology, social work, nursing, and psychiatric rehabilitation. It has consistently received highly favorable evaluations from health care professionals as well as people in recovery from mental illness. This guide represents a new clinical approach to the planning and delivery of mental health care. It emerges from the mental health recovery movement, and has been developed in the process of the efforts to transform systems of care at the local, regional, and national levels to a recovery orientation. It will be an extremely useful tool for planning care within the context of current health care reform efforts and increasingly useful in the future, as systems of care become more person-centered. Consistent with other patient-centered care planning approaches, this book adapts this process specifically to meet the needs of persons with serious mental illnesses and their families. Partnering for Recovery in Mental Health is an invaluable guide for any person involved directly or indirectly in the provision, monitoring, evaluation, or use of community-based mental health care.

This book brings together current research on recovery and wellbeing, to inform mental health systems and wider community development.

Focuses on a shift away from traditional clinical preoccupations towards new priorities of supporting the patient.

This book takes the lofty vision of "recovery" and of a "life in the community" for every adult with a mental illness promised by the U.S. President's New Freedom Commission and shows the reader what is entailed in making this vision a practical reality for people with mental illnesses and their families.

It is only in the past 20 years that the concept of 'recovery' from mental health has been more widely considered and researched. This book is unique in addressing philosophical issues - including conceptual challenges and opportunities - raised by the notion of recovery of people with mental illness.

Narratives of Recovery from Mental Illness presents research that challenges the prevailing view that recovery from ‘mental illness’ must take place within the boundaries of traditional mental health services. While Watts and Higgins accept that medical treatment may be a vital start to some people’s recovery, they argue that mental health problems can also be resolved through everyday social interactions, and through peer and community support. Using a narrative approach, this book presents detailed recovery stories of 26 people who received various diagnoses of ‘mental illness’ and were involved in a mutual help group known as ‘GROW’. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of each story, chapters offer new understandings of the journey into mental distress and a progressive entrapment through a combination of events, feelings, thoughts and relationships. The book also discusses the process of ongoing personal liberation and healing which assists recovery, and suggests that friendship, social involvement, compassion, and nurturing processes of change all play key factors in improved mental well-being. This book provides an alternative way of looking at ‘mental illness’ and demonstrates many unexplored avenues and paths to recovery that need to be considered. As such, it will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, nursing, social work and occupational therapy, as well as to service providers, policymakers and peer support organisations. The narratives of recovery within the book should also be a source of hope to people struggling with ‘mental illness’ and emotional distress

Learn to harness the process of recovery from mental illness for use in the transformative healing of your OT clients! This informative book for occupational therapists describes the Recovery Model from theoretical and experiential perspectives, and shows how to use it most effectively. It examines the major constructs of the model, describes the recovery process, offers specific OT approaches to support recovery, and provides guidelines for incorporating wellness and recovery principles into mental health services. This unique book you will show you: how recovery--in this case from schizophrenia--can be used as a transformative healing process the challenges and benefits of a dual role as a mental health professional and a consumer of mental health services the story of one occupational therapist’s journey of discovery in relation to her own mental illness why treating mental illness as a medical problem can be counterproductive to recovery three different teaching approaches--the executive approach, the therapist approach, and the liberationist approach--and how they lead to dramatically different outcomes the vital relationship between occupational therapy and recovery and wellness--with an enlightening case study how to use the Adult Sensory Profile to evaluate and design interventions for sensory processing preferences a system for monitoring, reducing, and eliminating uncomfortable or dangerous physical symptoms and feelings how to establish partnerships between mental health researchers and persons with psychiatric disabilities

This book takes a lofty vision of "recovery" and of "a life in the community" for every adult with a serious mental illness promised by the U.S. President's 2003 New Freedom Commission on Mental Health and shows the reader what is entailed in making this vision a reality. Beginning with the historical context of the recovery movement and its recent emergence on the center stage of mental health policy around the world, the authors then clarify various definitions of mental health recovery and address the most common misconceptions of recovery held by skeptical practitioners and worried families. With this framework in place, the authors suggest fundamental principles for recovery-oriented care, a set of concrete practice guidelines developed in and for the field, a recovery guide model of practice as an alternative to clinical case management, and tools to self-assess the recovery orientation of practices and practitioners. In doing so, this volume represents the first book to go beyond the rhetoric of recovery to its implementation in everyday practice. Much of this work was developed with the State of Connecticut's Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, helping the state to win a #1 ranking in the recent NAMI report card on state mental health authorities. Since initial development of these principles, guidelines, and tools in Connecticut, the authors have become increasingly involved in refining and tailoring this approach for other systems of care around the globe as more and more governments, ministry leaders, system managers, practitioners, and people with serious mental illnesses and their families embrace the need to transform mental health services to promote recovery and community inclusion. If you've wondered what all of the recent to-do has been about with the notion of "recovery" in mental health, this book explains it. In addition, it gives you an insider's view of the challenges and strategies involved in transforming to recovery and a road map to follow on the first few steps down this exciting, promising, and perhaps long overdue path.