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The Family Role in Recovery: Understanding the Illness and Embracing the Process
The fear and distress are unimaginable when serious mental illness strikes families. They become confused when their loved one acts in an erratic or unfamiliar way and may feel helpless when a child or adult refuses treatment. New concerning behaviors emerge, and aspects of their loved one’s...
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From the Publisher – Declining Physical Health: The Other Side of the Recovery Process
When I was struggling through my 10-year battle with depression, the most prevalent thing in the back of my mind each and every day was a silent prayer to recover and no longer suffer with the daily feelings of hopelessness and despair that were the hallmarks of my illness. Nothing else...
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In My Own Voice: The Disability of Mental Health
Mental illness is known to be a devastating disease that is well understood by the treatment community. In recent years however, we have heard more input from patients (commonly referred to as “consumers”) about their experience with mental illnesses of all types. Clinicians have known...
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New Directions in Healthcare and the Promise of Recovery
In case you didn’t notice, this is a time of radical change in the behavioral health and health fields. However, challenging the policy and fiscal landscapes have become, it’s important to remember that we’re all still in the business of helping people to recover, achieve goals, and be part...
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A Family Member’s Journey into the Depths of Bipolar Disorder
Only a few short years before leaving his cat and clothes in the covered alleyway, next to the dumpster behind the deli on 2nd Avenue, Bob was an accomplished plastics engineer. His parents, brother and sister were living back east, and his favorite aunts, an uncle and cousin lived a couple of...
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How About Recovery for People with Psychiatric Disabilities in Long-term Care?
Happily, the concept of “recovery” has become a powerful force in the mental health system. We talk now about a “recovery-oriented system” and “recovery-oriented services.” In doing so we express our sense of hope—our conviction—that people with serious, long-term psychiatric...
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Peer Run Services Playing Pivotal Roles in Promoting Health, Recovery and Full Citizenship
In the words of one of our greatest peer support leaders Shery Mead, “In peer support we come together with the intention of changing our patterns, getting out of ‘stuck’ places, building relationships that are respectful, mutually responsible and potentially mutually transforming. We...
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Quality Life Promotes Recovery
What may have been lost and left out in discussions on mental health treatment has been the importance of “a quality of life” as a tool of mental health treatment. What I have become aware of is the need for consumers to live at a standard that is not separate from what he/she sees as preferred...
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Recovery: A Participant in Life
Living one’s own life: a rather simple concept but somehow thrown on the back burner. Somewhere along the path in this journey of mental illness, we lose ourselves. Prior to the onset of my mental illness—well into adulthood—I was someone: a daughter, an educated woman, a teacher, a wife, a...
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Stigma and Recovery: New Approaches to Old Challenges
Thomas R. Insel, MD stated, “Psychiatry is the only part of medicine where there is actually greater stigma for receiving treatment for these illnesses than for having them” (Insel, NIMH Report 2006). There are many aspects to the stigma surrounding mental illness. It manifests itself as a...
