DISCOVERING AND MAINTAINING RECOVERY FOR THE CONSUMER

(A Consumer's perspective)

"You've got to search for the hero inside yourself,

Search for the secrets you hide,

Search for the hero inside yourself,

Until you find the key to your life"

…………..M People

By

Les Mitchell

Consumer Advisor

26 February 2001©

E-mail: lesmich50@hotmail.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the author. MidCentral health has not expressed any views in respect of this document, nor has the author sought them.

Preface

Throughout history, many individuals have been able to recover from a mental illness; often through strenuous personal efforts to transcend and overcome inadequacies or events. Recovery is a concept that is slowly taking shape within our society on an ever increasing scale. The concept has gained momentum from the development of the consumer movement. The increasing involvement of consumers in service delivery and resource development, especially psycho-education for both their peers and clinicians, shows clearly that a person diagnosed with a mental illness can be capable of productive and even superior performance in socially valuable roles.

Consumer empowerment and the recovery vision have been developed in the matrix of the Consumer Rights Movement.

My increasing frustrations, in this part of the world is the expectations that recovery will be magically translated into reality within our health system, made me realise that recovery belongs to the consumer. You initiate it and an attempt should be made by a fellow consumer to map out the recovery path and hurdles that need to be negotiated along the journey.

No model of recovery exists, per se. I have attempted to outline a broad structure that I believe is pertinent to each consumer; only parts of this document will accurately describe the individual needs each consumer will have to address. Consumers, through their own life experience and biological make-up, have an individual road for recovery.

My own recovery has taken some thirty-five years to come to grips with. For most of those years I was the 'French resistance' fighting the medical model. If there is a message for our young consumers reading this, please take the recovery concept on board now; so that by my age you will have indeed enjoyed and have had a productive life, without sacrificing too much.

I would like to dedicate this paper to all consumers; those who have gone before us and those who are somewhere on the Recovery Road; may your journey be safe, fulfilling and rewarding.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRIMARY PHASE

I maintain that Recovery has definable stages in its pathway. I have classified these stages as:

¨ The Primary Phase,

¨ The Secondary Phase, and

¨ The Tertiary Stage.

The primary stage is recognising that you have an illness and accepting this. The secondary stage is doing something about it, how to cope with it and start to learn something about yourself; challenging possibly some of your beliefs/actions. The final stage is the tertiary stage where you consolidate your action plan and move onto a better life.

These stages can be a process of going back to where you started from or progress can be overlapping or inter-phasing.

The three stages, I believe, allow easily identifiable targets for you with consolidation of stages being necessary throughout the phases.

Phase 1 covers the following tools necessary to start the Primary Phase of Recovery:

· The awakening

· The map of recovery

· Satisfying the bereavement process

· learning insight, choice and empowerment

· developing trust and hope

· developing communication skills

· planning your recovery with realistic goals

· exploring the word "holistic": mental, physical, spiritual, social.

· Medication education and assimilation

· Personal responsibility

· Positive thinking and never giving up

· Support especially with role models

· Diet

· Sleep

· Your Keyworker relationship

“THE AWAKENING”

"You've got to search for the hero inside yourself,

Search for the secrets you hide,

Search for the hero inside yourself

And then you'll find the key to your life."……………………………………..M People

Recovery involves hard work. It’s like looking at yourself in the mirror and accepting what you see in stark reality. Sometimes what you see is what you despise; time for a change, then?

Recovery involves naked honesty with yourself and either acceptance, moderation or rejection of some values. It also involves honesty with your doctor and nurse; identifying the ‘real’ problem causing you distress. Most consumers go out of their way to deny the problem. This in part is possibly due to lack of self-awareness or simple naivete or in many cases part of the illness. This only extends the period of unwellness and teaches you bad escape mechanisms. Every time we lie to others we lie to ourselves. Lies germinate and trying to weave them into a tapestry of deceit only fuels the introduction of extreme paranoia and condemning guilt. Your doctor and nurse have met your problem before and because of their position are the best ‘friends’ to help you over the rough time of admission of human frailty. If they don’t, get a second opinion, this is your right.

It involves facing the basic truth as to what really triggered the ‘acute’ episode and working on an action plan to terminate the trigger or at least know how to avoid it in future.

My main aim in addressing the Recovery model in the Primary stage (possibly the acute setting), is to educate you who are new to the system, to stop the ‘revolving door’ admission eventuality and to launch you into the secondary phase of recovery, whilst back out in the community.

Our starting point for recovery in life is never our own choice. Things just got out of hand. Everything came to a boiling point inside yourself and suddenly you ended up in hospital or at a crisis point, where your whole life disintegrates in front of you.

For most of you waking up in hospital with someone hovering over you is probably your first recall that you are mentally unwell. Some of us at this stage find that we are in a stunned state unable to control our bodily functions. For some of us we could have been kidnapped by 'aliens'. Whatever our perception of reality and the present it is not nice. In fact is terrifying.

It is like the first time either Mum or Dad abandoned you on your first day of school. Horrifying wasn’t it? Having to cope with the strange antics and customs of other traumatised kids. Everyone yelling, no one is listening to your struggles? What made matters worse was the appearance of the "Oldie" at the front of the class room, who reminded you of Grandma in her dictatorial prime.

So what can we do about it? We are only consumers, what do we know?

My answer to you is that you know the whole story and each of us has the solution it just needs a lot of discovering what we are all about and who we want to become. Your journey through the recovery pathway will give you an understanding of what the problem is in a way that allows you to take responsibility for your behaviours and thereby influencing positives outcomes for yourself.

I believe there are three mitigating causes why we ended up the way we are:

· Psycho-traumatising family upbringing,

· Biological (genetic) vulnerability, or

· A harmful psychosocial present environment possibly further worsened by some form of addiction.

Our present environment is one that has been fashioned by us (good or bad). Our genetic code is unique to each of us. Our families are either our blessing or our curse. Remember these three points: environment, genetics and family life.

The above three factors could also be linked together, adding to the severity of your illness.

I would like to define the Recovery Pathway as illustrated in the following diagram:

MAP OF RECOVERY

SECONDARY PHASE OF RECOVERY