As you have amazing content it’s easy to share. I believe, we should judge how much the recovery agenda is now accepted by looking at how much prominence is afforded this user/survivor discourse in the training of professionals and academics.
Whenever it boils down to the recovery agenda they are the real ‘experts’.
With its reversal of what really is of primary and secondary significance, the most radical implication of the recovery agenda, is the fact that whenit gets to problems to do with values, meanings and relationships, it’s users/survivors themselves who are the most knowledgable and informed. That said, this article was written a few years ago and is reproduced with kind permission ofDr. Pat Bracken, who is delivering a talk entitled A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Art, Surrealism, Mental Health Recovery in the West Cork Hotel, Skibbereen @ 30pm on Wed 4th June. Besides, away from models altogether. In that it involves getting us to move, not simply beyond the medical model.
Sometimes And so it’s argued that what really was needed is a shift from a ‘medical model’ to a ‘recovery model’.
I will argue that problems with the current way of thinking about mental health go deeper than simply the use of the medical model.
We rob it of its real challenge to the status quo, when we start to think about recovery as just another model. In here, I want to show why I believe that’s wrong. This is where it starts getting really serious. The word was first employed in this way by service users but in recent years was taken up by many professionals who are seeking change in how we think about mental health. Just think for a moment. In mental health circles, the word ‘recovery’ has increasingly come to signal an alternative agenda in mental health. In Ireland, the concept features prominently in the Vision for Change document, and the Mental Health Commission gave very clear support to the idea in their discussion document A Vision for a Recovery Model in Irish Mental Health Services.
We are familiar with critiques of the medical model.
In the 20th century, technological thinking came to dominate our understanding of ourselves and the nature of health and healing.
With that said, this paradigm frames the way in which problems ‘show up’ for us. Actually I believe that the medical model is only one a manifestation more fundamental problem, while it is obviously a major problem. Alongside biological models of ‘symptom’ production we have ‘cognitive behavioural’ models, psychoanalytic models, even social models of different sorts. I call this the ‘technological paradigm’. Make sure you leave a comment about it. Through this, it underscores not the just the medical model but also most psychological and managerial approaches to mental health.
It promotes a ‘model based’ way of looking at human difficulties. These argue that the medical framing of experiences of madness and distress is wrong and destructive and that this leads to the unnecessary and harmful use of drugs and ECT in a misguided attempt to treat ‘symptoms’. While training courses and university departments, with that said, this paradigm underscores the centrality of ‘experts’, codes of practice. By the way, the technological paradigm puts things like the development of models, classification systems, comparisons of different interventions etcetera at the centre of the mental health discourse. In this technological paradigm, problems to do with values, meanings, relationships and power are not ignored but they are always secondary to the ‘more important’ technical facts of mental health.
