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Last night, quite by accident, I listened to a short piece about recovery in mental health services on a Radio 4 programme. It’s available here – about halfway through the programme.
I’d always thought we could learn a lot from Mental Health, but what I heard surprised me. One of the speakers made the point that in Mental Health services, recovery has been “hijacked” by professionals and in reality it’s “business as usual”.
It goes “against the grain” of their professional training and the (active) professional / (passive) client relationship – and has even been used to cut back funding for services. Despite lots of jobs and teams now having “recovery” in their title.
Surely this won’t happen in our field?
There is no doubt that this will happen in many places. We need to all be aware of this possibility and flag it whenever it is seen to happen. And develop an action plan to deal with it when it happens.
Thanks for flagging this!
Tony you are kidding right, Recovery was hijacked the minute it beacame policy, we have a full blown hostage situation now!
Welcome to the site.
Annemarie x
Hi Tony – share your concern! A suite of minimum expectations of all partnerships, set and monitored by users and carers is a way to ensure no (more) hi-jacking takes place. .
Might make myself unpopular saying this but I’m noticing a tendency to employ increasing numbers of Commissioning Managers who have no prior experience of working in drug and alcohol field, let alone with users and carers.. What you then get is “Argos catalogue” commissioning – NTA says we need one of them and one of them , Home Office needs that, and then we have to have protocols to tie them all together, rather than looking at more creative solutions. Might be being unfair but I’ve been hugely disappointed by how few commissioners are applauding the recovery movement.
£800 million pounds
Hi Tony, welcome to Wired In, you are so right, and I agree with you Mal , the sad fact is that mental health is now being looked at with as much cut backs as possible.
The NTA really should release the true figures of the cut backs, CMHT’s are now recognised as failing and are having to halve the service users and send them back to their own GP’s.
DAT’s are in the middle and using us addicts as numbers through the books and then push them to tendering agencies. Which are far more prone to quanity and not quailty.
Not a pretty picture.
Best wishes
Great image Annemarie-do we pay the 800million ransom? “Argos catalogue” commissioning made me laugh-Models of Care can seem like that sometimes. Hitting targets is the number 1 priority for DATs for lots of valid reasons but this seems to have become disconnected from mobilising resources for Recovery-though I’m not sure abstinence targets would help? For many DAATs treatment has become the end and not the “means” or “catalyst” for Recovery it can be-after all it reduces shoplifting!-the Recovery movement seems to be causing a “copernican revolution” which is changing this-after all the earth revolves around the sun not the other way round!
Sorry all, I just realised that the “£800 million pounds” was a bit minimalist. I was doing too many things at once and pressed Submit. The point I was going to make was that we have £800 million pounds invested in drug treatment and thats a remarkable sum of money when you look back. My point was about using this to invest in a Recovery Oriented Integrated System of treatment that will leave behind a recovery legacy for our children and their children. Imagine that the economic downturn got so bad that this £800 milion was badly hit. What have we got now that will survive and be there for future generations? -our ‘Recovery Legacy’ if you will.
Maybe Im naive or talking myself out of a job but we appear to have developed a system nationally that can foster vested commercial and professional interests.. somtimes but not always at the expense of promoting the truly sustainable networks and communities of recovery …..
There is an ancient Chinese proverb which says “The leader the people love is the second best kind of leader. The fourth best they hate. The third best they fear. The second best they love. But with the best kind of leader when the job is done the people say ‘We did it ourselves’”
Nye Bevan put it more succinctly “The only good reason to seek power is in order to give it away.Maybe we have somthing to learn here about developing services which focus on empowerment
indeed, you’ve got to give it away to keep it
