Recovery in Mental Health / World Psychiatric Association (PDF)

Winner of Medical Journalists' Association Specialist
Readership Award 2010

Recovery is widely endorsed as a guiding principle of mental
health policy. Recovery brings new rules for services, e.g. user
involvement and person-centred care, as well as new tools for
clinical collaborations, e.g. shared decision making and
psychiatric advance directives. These developments are complemented
by new proposals regarding more ethically consistent
anti-discrimination and involuntary treatment legislation, as well
as participatory approaches to evidence-based medicine and
policy.

Recovery is more than a bottom up movement turned into top down
mental health policy in English-speaking countries. Recovery
integrates concepts that have evolved internationally over a long
time. It brings together major stakeholders and different
professional groups in mental health, who share the aspiration to
overcome current conceptual reductionism and prognostic negativism
in psychiatry.

Recovery is the consequence of the achievements of the user
movement. Most conceptual considerations and decisions have evolved
from collaborations between people with and without a lived
experience of mental health problems and the psychiatric service
system. Many of the most influential publications have been
written by users and ex-users of services and work-groups that have
brought together individuals with and without personal experiences
as psychiatric patients.

In a fresh and comprehensive look, this book covers definitions,
concepts and developments as well as consequences for scientific
and clinical responsibilities. Information on relevant history,
state of the art and transformational efforts in mental health care
is complemented by exemplary stories of people who created through
their lives and work an evidence base and direction for
Recovery.

This book was originally published in German. The
translation has been fully revised, references have been amended to
include the English-language literature and new material has been
added to reflect recent developments. It features a Foreword by
Helen Glover who relates how there is more to recovery than the
absence or presence of symptoms and how health care professionals
should embrace the growing evidence that people can reclaim their
lives and often thrive beyond the experience of a mental
illness.

Comments on German edition:

"It is fully packed with useful information for practitioners,
is written in jargon free language and has a good reading
pace."

Theodor Itten, St. Gallen, Switzerland and Hamburg, Germany

"This book is amazingly positive. It not only talks about hope,
it creates hope. Its therapeutic effects reach professional mental
health workers, service users, and carers alike. Fleet-footed and
easily understandable, at times it reads like a suspense
novel."

Andreas Knuf, pro mente sana, Switzerland

'"This is the future of psychiatry"' cheered a usually
service-oriented manager after reading the book. We might not live
to see it.'

Ilse Eichenbrenner, Soziale Psychiatrie, Germany