preview

Essay On Recovery

Decent Essays

Recovery is quite a complex concept, as people have different perceptions of its meaning and what it looks like, which is why there are two recovery perspectives in mental health, which is personal recovery and clinical recovery. Clinical recovery is described as a cure to symptoms due to medical treatments (McCranie, 2010). Clinical recovery was the main approach mental health professionals used in the 1980s not only in New Zealand, but also around the world. This is due to people’s perception that people with mental illness were ‘lunatics’, something of the devil, related to witchcrafts and incurable. According to Brunton (as cited in Ball, 2010), New Zealand’s first ‘lunatics’ drew the general public’s attention as they were seen as …show more content…

Clinical recovery and institutionalization was not successful in curing or reducing the symptoms of patients, in fact, in most cases, it made their conditions worse, as they were basically isolated from everyone in the community and lacked the social support they needed, which is why another recovery perspective was established to meet the needs that clinical recovery failed to offer.

Personal Recovery
As the number of people that realized there is an alternative way to recovery increased, personal recovery became the guiding principle worldwide to mental health care delivery, and it is defined in the Mental Health Commission’s Blueprint for Mental Health Services here in New Zealand as the “ability to live well in the presence or absence of one’s mental illness” (O’Hagan, 2001). This definition is quite broad, as it acknowledges that the experience of recovery and what it means differs in each individual and that ‘living well’ could mean different things to different people (O’Hagan, 2001). The roots of the visions of recovery was influenced by the aftermath of the deinstitutionalization era, as researchers, professionals and the general public started to realize that the needs of people with mental illness is not just relief of their symptoms (Anthony, 1993). It is important to understand that recover does not mean cure and that the illness or the symptoms have

Get Access