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Recovery from Mental Illness is Possible

Recovery is for Us, Our Families, Our System of Care

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......As recovery becomes the goal of mental health care, everyone involved needs to shift their ideas about possibilities, outcomes, goals, and our ways of being with each other in the process. Each individual in recovery, each supporter, and each clinical care provider can develop new ways of being together as we go about our work. Each day we need to shift away from goals of stabilization, to goals of recovery and full lives. Making this shift presents challenges for all of us, and also possibilities for marvelous joyful success. For people who are recovering, this shift is of critical importance.

......Usually, when we talk about recovery from mental illness, it is often a discussion about what we, as people with mental illness, need to do to change our way of being, our level of wellness, our methods of self-care etc. It is all about what we need to do to fix ourselves. It is important that the recovery process be an adventure that people in recovery as well as our supporters and our system undertake together.

......As we begin to understand that we can, in fact, recover from mental illness, our supporters also need to understand and believe this fact. While the personal responsibility ( Copeland, 1997) of recovery lies with us, our families and support teams also have a responsibility to encourage our journey. For many of us, our supporters have been engaged in a supportive role with us for a long time, sometimes decades. We’ve taken on the role of the person who is not quite right, who is a patient, who needs help. Our supporters have often taken on a role that engages with us, according to our identity as a person who is a mental illness (Deegan, 2003).

Recovery has many definitions. Webster’s New World Dictionary (1970), defines recovery as: a regaining of something lost or stolen, a return to health, consciousness, etc., a regaining of balance, control, composure, etc. At Recovery Innovations (2003), the definition of recovery is’ “Remembering who you are and using all your strengths to be who you were meant to be.”

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