Sue Holttum
Over the last 10 years NHS mental health services have become more and more focused on the concept of “recovery”. For whatever reasons (changing views of psychiatry, service user voices, or simply a change in the climate of healthcare) we seem less in the business of cure and more about empowerment. But what is all this about and how does it apply to you if you have a mental health problem? And is it really happening or is the core business of mental health services still drugs and hospital? In the following short feature (5 minutes or so of audio with slides) I consider two recent papers which may help in understanding these questions: one by Mary Leamy and her colleagues from 2011 and the other by Rachel Perkins and Mike Slade from 2012. The first paper looks at the concept of recovery as personal journey and how service users define it. The second considers how mental health services are trying to support recovery and what the challenges are. Both these papers offer a valuable contribution to the understanding of recovery and how we go about implementing it practice.
(Note: File is .wmv. There is also a transcript of the audio below).
TRANSCRIPT
Mary Leamy and her colleagues begin their paper,
