In the last few euphoric days before the Christmas holidays, SPN staff were delighted to receive boxes of the latest SPN paper, which followed on from the recovery and diversity study day held in London this October.
The dynamic red covered publications have already been sent out as a thank you Christmas gift to all the delegates on the day, and can be viewed online here. You can request a copy free of charge as an SPN member by sending us your contact address, subject to availability!
Director Terry Bamford was “delighted” at the record turnaround and praised all the Paper’s contributors for their thoughtful documentation of the day’s important debates.
The Paper has certainly been timely in taking a critical look at the potential of the recovery agenda, as well as some of the anxieties it provokes amongst service users, particularly those from marginalised and seldom heard groups including black and minority ethnic, lesbian and gay, women and migrants.
“Whilst also looking at good recovery practice, this paper scrutinises recovery in terms of two central questions: who defines and owns the recovery process, and whether recovery as currently defined and practised is relevant to groups from diverse backgrounds including BME service users. As such it makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debates around recovery from a diversity angle”, said Raza Griffiths, SPN Joint Network Co-ordinator, who was one of the Steering group members for the study day.
SPN’s involvement in the evolving recovery agenda meanwhile has continued, with a keynote presentation on the journey in and out of wellness by Vicky Nicholls to over 200 delegates at the Working Together for Recovery conference in Southampton in November which looked at new types of worker around mental health recovery.
Her fellow Joint Network Co-ordinator, Raza Griffiths, meanwhile, delivered a presentation and engaged in discussions on recovery with a small group of 30 service users, carers, academics and social care staff at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Participant and new SPN member, Charmain Smith, said “It was an absolute joy to attend the SPN networking event at Leeds University on 15th November 2007. The thing that struck me most about it is that it felt so natural for Staff, Service Users and Carers to be discussing things together. I've been exposed to this kind of forum within the walls of Pathways before but never further afield or with as varied a group of people. I felt at one with the shared desire to see services become more social in their outlook to service users and their recovery.”
Some of the issues participants highlighted which needed to be explored to facilitate recovery was the need to prioritise recovery, not just crisis resolution, and the unease that recovery would be measured and quantified to become a meaningless ‘tick box’ exercise rather than an individual journey of discovery. A practical suggestion was to build up a store of service user recovery narratives to inspire people and provide a sense of community.
Some of these concerns were also reflected in a recent Mind seminar on recovery which both Vicky and Raza participated in.
Speaking from a BME perspective in particular, one of the contentious points that Raza made at this stimulating debate was that recovery narratives had to include the stories of those who had recovered by disengaging from the services meant to help them - but which had in fact harmed them. This was often the case for African Caribbean men, particularly with regard to their experiences of psychiatry. This posed a challenge to services to be honest about their need to improve in many respects.
“The discussions we have been involved in following on from the recovery and diversity study day have been really informative in revealing an emerging consensus around some of the possibilities as well as dangers of recovery as currently defined and practised”, said Raza Griffiths.
Click here to download the SPN paper on recovery and diversity
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