A letter to the editor published in the April 2008 edition of Psychiatric Services:By Myra Piat, Ph.D., Judith Sabetti, M.S.W., and Audrey Couture, M.Sc.
Douglas Mental Health University Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
To the Editor: Recovery has been celebrated as the guiding vision for mental health service delivery since Anthony declared the 1990s the "decade of recovery" (1). Both the President's New Freedom Commission (2) and the Kirby Commission in Canada (3) have made recovery the basis for transforming mental health services throughout North America, which is the result of decades of outcome research, consumer activism, and advances in psychiatric rehabilitation (4,5). Yet a recent Canadian study found that most recovering consumers were not using the word "recovery" to describe their experience and were not hearing about recovery from service providers.To read the entire letter to the editor, please click here.
In the context of a multisite, qualitative study of stakeholder perspectives on recovery conducted in 2006–2007, we asked 59 consumers with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression about their use of the word "recovery" and their sources of information on recovery. All had been receiving formal mental health services for at least six months before the study, most as long-term service recipients.
References:
- Anthony WA: Recovery from mental illness: the guiding vision of the mental health service system in the 1990s. Psychosocial Rehabilitation Journal 16:11–23, 1993
- Hogan MF: The President's New Freedom Commission: Recommendations to Transform Mental Health Care in America. Psychiatric Services 54:1467–1474, 2003 [Free Full Text]
- Kirby MJL, Keon WJ: Out of the Shadows at Last: Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada. Ottawa, Sénat du Canada, 2006
- Roberts G, Wolfson P: The rediscovery of recovery: open to all. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10:37–49, 2004 [Abstract/Free Full Text]
- Sowers W: Transforming systems of care: the American Association of Community Psychiatrists Guidelines for Recovery Oriented Services. Community Mental Health Journal 41:757–774, 2005 [CrossRef][Medline]
