Recovery as a conspiracy
The basic principle is: they who pay the piper call the tune. Well the Department of Health [DH] pays the piper, and the pipers are called CSIP and NIMHE (which are either wholly or partly funded by the DH). Documents such as the 10 High Impact Changes for Mental Health Services have cast a disturbing shadow over public health care, exaggerated by the indecent haste with which services have implemented them.
Roberts and Wolfson (2004) note the ‘clever’ appropriation of Recovery by the government into clinical governance. The government signalled its nefarious intentions as early as 2001 with the publication of The Journey to Recovery: the Government’s vision for mental health care. [In fact you might assume from this document that the government was here claiming recovery for itself.... when the reality is far from that.] Recovery was not intended to be an excuse for cutting services (and thereby staff) but the way in which documents such as the 10 High Impact Changes for Mental Health Services [not that there are ten - and only ten - changes that might improve mental health services - but that ten is a good number for a sound bite] are implemented mean that this is precisely what happens. If people who experience mental health difficulties are all encouraged to use the same community resources as everybody else then there is no need for resources that are especially geared for people who have mental health difficulties. As Baker, Brown and Fazey (2006) have shown in the case of higher education, community resources are not often available for the wider community to be able to support people with a need for specialist support. This results in those people, who thereby feel themselves unable to avail themselves of these resources, becoming excluded from them. Therefore, social inclusion is social exclusion!!
Directors and chief executives and even politicians may huff and puff about the noble principles of recovery but i am a believer that the greatest conspiracies are opportunistic, not plotted. So it is with Recovery.
