Recovery and Mental Health Promotion

1
Recovery and Mental Health Promotion

• Margit Schmolke, Ph.D.
• German Academy for Psychoanalysis (DAP)
• Munich, Germany

2
Agenda

• Developments towards a philosophy of positive
  health
• Mental health promotion
• Empirical studies
• Recovery process
• Role of recovery in mental health promotion
• Implications for clinical practice

3
Towards a Philosophy of Positive Health (1)

• Morbidity rates and chronicity still high
• Prevention and health promotion necessary
• Knowledge and needs of users essential
• Shift from only minimizing risks and focusing on
  deficits and pathology towards
• strengthening positive health of a person

4
Towards a Philosophy ofPositive Health (2)

• Positive (mental) health increasingly discussed
  in
• - Health psychology
• - Development psychopathology
• - Prevention and health promotion
• - Psychoneuroimmunology
• - Psychiatry and psychiatric nursing

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Health Promotion(WHO Ottawa Charter, 1986)

• Positive health potential
• Strengthening individual and community resources
• Health to be actively produced in daily life
• Health promotion
• Health promotive policy,
• environments,
• community actions
• Developing personal competences
• Reorienting health services

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Mental Health Promotion(WHO, 1999 Herrman et
al., 2003)

• Mental health
• - Realizing ones own abilities
• - Coping with normal stresses of life
• - Working productively and fruitfully
• - Contributing to ones community
• Mental health promotion
• - Improved physical health
• - Better educational performance of children
• - Better productivity of workers in
  business/industry
• - Improved relationships within families and
  broader community
• - Lower rates of some mental disorders

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Empirical Studies (1)

• Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Australia
  (VicHealth, 1999 Herrman et al., 2003)
• Some determinants of mental health, e.g.
• Social connection and inclusion
• Freedom from discrimination and violence
• Economic participation

8
Empirical Studies (2)

• Study on health protective resources of persons
  suffering from schizophrenia (Schmolke, 2001,
  2003)
• Resources related to illness experience
• Personal resources
• Social resources
• Material resources

9
Recovery and Recovery Process

• No standard or universal characteristics
• Highly subjective and contextual
• Ongoing, dynamic, interactional process between
  strengths, vulnerabilities, resources and
  environment
• Actively self-managing psychiatric disorder
• Reclaiming, gaining, maintaining positive sense
  of self, roles and life beyond the mental health
  system

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Role of Recovery in Mental Health Promotion

• Overlapping concepts in mental health promotion
  and recovery
• Authors in recovery are persons themselves
  recovering from a mental disorder
• Recovery as subjective experience has an eminent
  place in the spectrum
• Prevention ? Health Promotion ? Treatment ?
• Recovery ? Rehabilitation

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Implications for Clinical Practice

• Researchers and clinicians benefit from learning
  about
• - individuals recovery processes
• - mental health strengthening factors
• - self-help and regulatory activities
• Risk of transforming autobiographical accounts by
  professionals
• Implementing knowledge in clinical interventions
  in mental and physical health care
• Claim expressed in WPA Consensus Statement on
  Psychiatric Prevention (Lecic-Tosevski et
  al.,2003)