Practicing Paradigm Shift

Practicing Paradigm Shift: OR Finding capital-R Recovery in the mental health system.

 Part I 

I have come to believe that Recovery with a capital R is not a theory, an approach or a concept, but that it is a a mode of being, or a practice. It is an active internal resource to fuel, ideally, all one’s interactions with oneself and other humans. (Though in fact, like other practices spiritual or metaphysical nature, few if any could reach that 24-7 ideal.)

 I have also come to believe it takes any person associated with mental health services in the U.S., whether they are a consumer, family member, provider or psychiatrist, at least 5 years to grasp Recovery at this active level.

By five years I mean five from the time that person has fully and positively embraced the Recovery approach.  Five years of thinking about it daily, living with it, working to integrate it into one’s life and work.

There is no science to this five year assertion—it is based on my experience and what I have observed in people around me. But it took me that long—and, unlike many program staff, family or mental patients who may not be ready for ‘new thing’, I wanted to believe it from day one.  You could say my life depended on it.

To get to the place where Recovery is an active part of your response to life you have to unpack a lot of other things. And you have to give up a lot, things that are hard for people to give up. You have to give up many ideas, some of which are among our most intimate cherished concepts. Ideas about who we are and what we can be, about the nature of caring, about what we can do for and with others, about the nature of consciousness itself.

What we think we know, what we believe about the power of science, medicine and statistics, what we may believe about society itself and how it functions, the icons and myths of modernity and rationalism, the very words we use unconsciously when speaking to ourselves, when dreaming. All these and more ideas and values have to shift within our consciousness in order for the paradigm of Recovery to take root.

The concrete of what people have been taught about being human in the last two hundred years is thick and strong—it is the foundation of contemporary civilization in many ways, certainly of the science and method of approaching problems both physical and social. The idea for instance that one’s person resides in one’s mind, and that one’s mind resides in one’s brain. That sanity is essential and desirable and that is is defined by a specified set  and range of experiences. That aberrations from norms of behavior and understanding are dangerous, exciting, or meaningless. That healthy minds and people are analoguos to healthy bodies—that you could look inside them and see they were all the same.

This concrete undergirds all sorts of important things we have been taught, things we are attached to. But it must be broken. It must crack in many places to allow Recovery to grow through and restructure a new conceptual environment in which the lunatics can, should, will control the asylum.