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Making Recovery Real - Recovery focussed systems and practice
Date recorded: 26 February 2009
This session looked at various aspects of the development of recovery focussed practice. It features presentations from:
  • Mary O'Hagan, International Consultant and trainer
  • Professor Phil Barker and Poppy Buchanan Barker, Clan Unity

How can the system enable recovery-based practice?
Mary O’Hagan, International Consultant and trainer
Politicians, communities, policy, funding, organisational structures, power relationships and shared beliefs all help to drive systems. Most of our systems inhibit recovery based practice. This talk attempts to answer the question – what would mental health systems look like if they enabled recovery?



icon Parallel session audio recording: Mary OHagan - How can the system enable recovery-based practice? (29.07 MB)

icon Parallel session presentation: Mary Ohagan - How can the system enable recovery-based practice? (452.78 kB)
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Stolen identities: Reclaiming the human story
Professor Phil Barker and Poppy Buchanan-Barker, Clan Unity International
When people experience problems in human living, they are often diagnosed and labelled as having various forms of ‘mental illness’ or ‘psychiatric disorder’. The first thing that happens in this process is that the person’s human identity is stolen. The person’s human story is distorted, translated or transformed into a ‘psychiatric story’, through technical, psychological, bureaucratic or medical language. The person becomes a ‘case’ and various terms - ‘patient’, ‘client ‘, ‘service user’, ‘consumer’ – are used to avoid acknowledging that a complex human person is involved.

In this presentation we discuss how recovery must begin when the person is at their ‘lowest ebb’. Wherever possible, this should begin within the person’s natural life in community. If the person is admitted to psychiatric care, this recovery should begin at the very point of entry, by helping the person to hold on to the native, human story of their experience of ‘breakdown’ or ‘distress’. Where people have a long history of being a ‘psychiatric patient’, recovery needs to focus on helping people to reclaim the personal, human story that has been lost.



icon Parallel session audio recording: Phil and Poppy Buchanan Barker - Stolen identities (23.08 MB)

icon Parallel session presentation: Phil and Poppy Bunchanan Barker - Stolen Identities (1.45 MB)