🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured⤴
The biomedical/maintenance model alone isn’t working. As the New York Times reported in 2021, rates of mental distress and suicide have risen: “[T]he science did little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health — rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use — went the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.” We are, by many counts, in the midst of a mental health crisis.
So why aren’t we publicizing recovery to the public, patients, and their families? Why isn’t recovery mentioned in more research studies and during every clinical appointment in which mental health is discussed and in at least some media coverage?
Part of the problem is that there are many definitions of recovery, and medicine prefers single answers. Officially, there are two types of mental health recovery: clinical and personal. Clinical recovery is rooted in the biomedical and maintenance model. It’s aimed at the reduction of symptoms. It says we’re basically all the same. Symptoms in one person are the same as symptoms in another. It’s determined by a physician. The expert defines the course of treatment and, often without telling the patient, decides if and when the patient has healed.
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