The recovery model: one paradigm, two conceptions

Abstract

In recent decades, new models of recovery have been developed in the field of mental health, based on the transfer of hospital treatment to the community. Community mental health became the standard of care and treatment, and people with mental illness were able to freely congregate and support each other. The new recovery model includes broad aspects of the person recovery became the “guiding vision” of mental health services. New definitions of recovery were developed that focus on the difference between recovering from an illness and being in recovering, or in other words, “clinical recovery” versus “personal recovery.” This important development represents a huge challenge for policy makers and planners of modern mental health systems. As is clear from this article, efforts to implement a recovery-oriented perspective that will produce a more consumerbased mental health system have just begun. The urgent need to investigate these efforts, taking into account the complexity many meanings of “recovery”, begins to manifest itself in mental health research agendas. Recovery-oriented treatments focus on preparing and training the person with mental disorders to acquire the knowledge necessary to manage their own disease and recovery process, and thus improve overall functioning, health and quality of life.