RECOVERY

Recovery Model vs Medical Model

Recovery Model vs Medical Model

Recovery Model

The mental health field in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. Former patients and other advocates are working with mental health providers and government agencies to incorporate spirituality into mental health care. While the significance of spirituality in substance abuse treatment has been acknowledged for many years due to widespread recognition of the therapeutic value of 12-step programs, this is a new development in the treatment of serious mental disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia(Breitbart, Harvey, 2008). The incorporation of spirituality into recovery is one of four hallmarks of the recovery model that is becoming increasingly accepted as the reigning treatment approach in the mental health fiedl.

A second perspective that distinguishes the recovery model from prior approaches is the assumption that people can fully recover from even the most severe forms of mental disorders. It creates an orientation of hope rather than the "kiss of death" that diagnoses like schizophrenia once held (Burge, 2006). One hundred years ago, Emil Kraepelin,MD, identified the disorder now known as schizophrenia. He described it as dementia praecox, a chronic, unremitting, gradually deteriorating condition, having a progressive downhill course with an end state of dementia and incompetence.

However, researchers in the past two decades in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, France and the USA have established that people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders are capable of regaining significant roles in society and of running their own lives. In fact, most persons with serious mental disorders do recover (Conill, Verger, 2007). Robert P. Liberman, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine notes that there is strong evidence that persons, even with long-term and disabling forms of schizophrenia, can 'recover,' that is, enjoy lengthy periods of time free of psychotic symptoms and partake of community life as independent citizens.

Daniel Fisher, MD, PhD, a former patient, now a psychiatrist, and internationally renowned advocate for the recovery model, maintains that "Believing you can recover is vital to recovery from mental illness." Recovery involves self-assessment and personal growth from a prior baseline, regardless of where that baseline was. Growth may take the overt form of skill development and resocialization, but it is essentially a spiritual revaluing of oneself, a gradually developed respect for one's own worth as a human being (Donnelly, Declan, 2005).Often when people are healing from an episode of mental disorder, their hopeful beliefs about the future are intertwined with their spiritual lives, including praying, reading sacred texts, attending devotional services, and following a spiritual practice.

Recovery versus Medical Model

The medical model tends to define recovery in negative terms (e.g., symptoms and complaints that need to be eliminated, disorders that need to be cured or removed).

Mark Ragins, MD observed that focusing on recovery does discount the seriousness of the conditions.

For severe mental illness it may seem almost dishonest to talk about recovery. After all, the conditions are likely to persist, in at least some form, ...